Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Critical Reflection 2
Critical Reflection 2
Jack Pellerito
Marisa Enos
ENG.111.W02
19 April 2017
A Developing Student
Taking English 111 this semester has taught me a great deal about writing, and even more
so about critical thinking, critical reading, and academic conversations. Before this English class,
I had only taken high school English classes. They weren't extremely different, but the style of
the papers we would write were very different. There was no "academic audience" that I had to
be sure my papers were suitable for. There was no synthesis or explications. There were essays,
and there were specific types of essays like persuasive, informative, etc. However, through this
course I have learned a great deal about my own writing, the writings of others, and how to
improve my writings and make them suitable for academic audiences. The main things that I saw
ability to use the proper viewpoint in my essays, and my ability to find quotes that fit into my
writing.
The first problem I had in this class was citing things in MLA style properly. I was
familiar with this from high school but our classes had never been extremely strict on the format
as long as we did indeed cite our sources and show we were not simply plagiarizing. I had had a
few bigger, more important papers in which I had to properly cite my sources, but I did it
incorrectly without knowing it. This class had us use MLA Citation on all of our papers and so I
quickly learned that I kept doing it wrong. The main issue I had at first was remembering all of
the little things like page numbers, instructor's name, etc. However, I also struggled most with
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my work cited page. I kept making simple mistakes here that would ruin the entire work cited
page. For example, in my first Compare and Contrast essay, this was my entire work cited page
Works Cited
It is easy to see how bad this work cited page is immediately. I totally missed adding my other
sources that I used in this essay. I also did not add all of the information needed for citing the
video by Ken Robinson or the article by Paulo Freire. This citation page was pretty much a
failure. However, after this course I was able to learn how to properly create a citation page.
From the AMS paper, my first draft, here is a section of my work cited page:
Works Cited
Anderson, Monica. "Technology Device Ownership: 2015." Pew Research Center: Internet,
Science & Tech. Pew Research Center, 29 Oct. 2015. Web. 22 Mar. 2017.
Crawford, Matthew. "Attention as a Cultural Problem." Exploring Connections: Learning in the
21st Century. Pearson Education Inc., 2016. Pp. 36-48.
As is easily visible, the sources have all the correct information needed and the sources are
alphabetized and everything. From the start of this course, I could not properly cite sources at the
end of my paper. At the end of the paper, I could properly make a work cited page with all the
On top of struggling with MLA citation in my essays, I also had problems using the
proper person in my essays. I kept repeatedly using second person or first person when I should
have been using third person. This took away from the essay because this went against the
guidelines of the paper and also was not suitable for writing for an academic audience. It made
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my papers seem as if I did not know how to write for an academic audience, which I didn't at the
beginning of the course. For example, from my first Compare and Contrast essay, I used the
following line saying "We need a new system of learning so that this is realized by more teachers
and they can take advantage of this instead of thinking their students are dumb." By using the
second person in this essay it made the essay sound much more unprofessional and not nearly as
intelligent as it could have had I used the proper person. By the later half of this course, I figured
things out and I would use the third person for all of my essays. For example, in my Schank vs.
Hooks Compare and Contrast essay, I used the proper person. The following line is taken from
this essay and uses the correct person, which is third: "whenever someone speaks, they always
have a mindset about the conversation or story being discussed." As is visible, this line, and this
essay, was in the third person. This is the proper person to be used for a writing for an academic
audience. I have been using only the third person in my essays since the first few times I missed
points for using the wrong person. This has made my writing much better.
Another area besides citation and the proper person that I improved on was choosing and
placing quotes in my papers. At the beginning, I would use quotes that did not quite make total
sense with my papers or my essays and so it would almost weaken my arguments instead of
backing them up. I would place quotes and take them out of context and they would just be
confusing to any reader. For example, a quote I placed in an essay about language crossing
ethnic and racial barriers was "when we select a particular skeleton from a political point of
view, we, most likely, will begin to believe the story we find ourselves telling"(Schank 133).
This quote doesn't have hardly any connection to the topic at all and doesn't fit the essay at all.
However, I improved my selection of quotes and my placement of them after this. In my second
draft of my AMS paper I selected much better quotes. When talking of why college students
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often struggle, I used this quote, "most first-year students are ill-prepared for the expectations of
the average college professor" (Leamnson 75). It fit much better for the context and the situation
and actually backed up my arguments. All of the quotes I now use as textual evidence actually fit
my essays and are not simply random quotes I throw into my essay.
111 has definitely helped me to improve my writing and my writing abilities and skills. Before
this class, I was a mediocre to bad writer. I understood the grammar and everything along those
lines fine, but when it came to some more in depth ideas, like connecting sources or thinking
critically and problematizing, I struggled a bit. I learned from my mistakes and I have become a
much better writer because of this class. I have learned many different things from this English
class both in writing and of thinking and learning in general. This class has helped me prepare
for the true environment of college and helped me to understand truly what is expected of my in
college learning. The differences between high school and college are definitely more defined for
me now than ever before and I have benefitted greatly from this class. The improvements in my
writing are definitely visible, but on top of that, I have improved as a learner.