Briceno 1

Daniel Briceno
Professor Beadle
English 113B
11 May 2016

Reflective Essay
Throughout my Semester in English 113B, I have learned more about myself as a writer
and learned where my strengths and weaknesses were. As I wrote my two essays and got
feedback, I understood that I had a lot to learn but, after this semester, I have improved
tremendously because of the feedback I got and how I applied it to my writing. Overall, I became
a better writer because I learned how go deeper in my writing and how to stay connected with
my thesis statement.
I became a better writer because I learned how to go deeper in my writing and be more
specific. For example, on my second essay called, As Suffering, I was talking about how A
suffers when he tries to make things work between him and Rhiannon. On the Fourth sentence of
my graded essay I said The reason why A tries to make this relationship work and find love is
because A is tired of not feeling and wants to have a connection with somebody (Briceno 1).
Although I did explain why he wants to have a relationship with Rhiannon, I do not explain his
situation of why he is tired of not having a connection with anybody. I also leave out why it is
hard for him to have a connection with somebody. On my new and polished essay, I went deeper
into explaining As situation and how his nature is the reason for why he cannot have any
connection with anybody. On my Revision essay I said The reason why A tries to make this
relationship work, find love, and form a connection with Rhiannon is because he is tired of not

Briceno 2
having any intimate relationships. No one knows who A is because he changes his appearance
everyday which means that he could not have any intimate relationships (Briceno 1). You can
see I went deeper and explained As situation and how he cannot achieve an intimate relationship
due to his nature of switching bodies everyday. This shows how I improved as a writer because it
shows how I went from a basic explanation to a more in depth explanation. This is important
because, with this more in depth explanation, I went deeper making it easier for the reader to
understand the situation from the beginning, making me an effective writer. I improved as a
writer because I could now write in a more in depth explanation. Since I can now explain my
writing more in depth, it shows how I improved as a writer throughout this course.
Not only am I a better writer because of my more in depth writing, but because I can also
connect all my work back into my thesis. Back on my First essay called The Christian Culture, I
was talking about how the Christian Culture affected me. On my graded essay I said This shows
how god works in these types of situations and how you should never lose faith because he is by
your side. This is important because since our family experienced this, it made me realize more
about myself as an individual (Briceno 3). As you can see, there was no connection about my
culture or how the culture affected me as an individual. Since I did not explain this, I failed to
connect my ideas back to my thesis statement. On my revised essay I did very well on
connecting my ideas back to my thesis. In one of my sentences of the paragraph I said This
example shows a lot about my culture because my culture is all about love and faith and without
these two components, I could almost guarantee that my father would not have survived. This
also shows a lot about my culture because of how we took action when we heard the news by
still going to church and testing our faith with god and declaring that he is our healer (Briceno
4). Just with that small portion alone, you can see that my ideas all connect back to my thesis as

Briceno 3
to how the Christian Culture affected me as I was going through some tough times. Since I can
connect my ideas back to my thesis, that makes me a very effective writer because you can see
how all of my ideas connect together instead of just throwing out random ideas as I did on the
graded essay. Without connecting my ideas, I would not have been an effective writer, therefore
showing my improvements in English 113B.
Throughout this semester I understood that I had a lot to learn in this semester. After
giving my evidence and analysis you can see that I had improved a lot as a writer by explaining
things more in detail and in depth and by connecting all my ideas back to my thesis. Without
these two components on my writing, I would never be as close as an effective writer as I am
today.