Shelton 1

Caylie Shelton

Ms. Sanchez

ERWC, Period 1

17 May 2017

Extreme Changes

For my reflection letter I have chosen the Racial Profiling essay, the Juvenile Justice

essay, and the Bullying essay for my three strong essays. For the process work, I chose the Into

the Wild Journals, the outline of the problems with food and the Brave New World Lit Circle

Sheet. From this work, I will reflect on what I learned about the structure of essays, the

integration of quotes, and the expansion of my vocabulary to show my improvement throughout

the year. I will evaluate my strengths of using figurative language and MLA format, and also my

weaknesses by explaining what I need to work on. I will address new skills I have learned by

showing the improvement of evidence supporting the thesis, as well as focusing on having strong

commentary. My weaknesses mainly focus on ethos, pathos, and logos. These particular essays

will show my improvements throughout the year as they are written in chronological order.

Throughout the year, I wrote three strong essays that showed my strengths and my love

for writing, and those were the Racial Profiling essay, the Juvenile Justice essay, and the

Bullying essay. The first essay, written in First Semester towards the beginning of the school year

was the Racial Profiling essay. Since I had a strong opinion on this topic, I was motivated and

ready to take on the challenge of expressing my opinion, yet also using the correct evidence to

back up my claim. Throughout the Racial Profiling essay, I used parallel structure in order to

help with the structure of the paper, and also to aid with the sentence flow. As shown in the essay

when I continuously used repetition of the word to in order to portray the importance of all of
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the verbs in the sentences. Also, I used a wide range of vivid vocabulary words such as violent

and irrational to completely point out the fact that racial profiling is wrong and certain races

should not be targeted solely based on the color of their skin because it alienates individuals and

unfortunately degrades their self worth (Shelton). Overall, this essay was one of my strongest

because of the importance and the drive I showed towards this certain topic as well as the

strengths I portrayed. The next essay I chose for my personal reflection was the Bullying Essay.

This topic is something I take extremely serious. In this essay, I mainly focused on the

wrongdoings of cyberbullying in which I then shared the use of snapchat, facebook, and ask.fm

to help show the extreme circumstances each of those social media accounts can have on a

childs life. I shared my opinion on this subject by explaining how teens can easily hide behind

a computer screen, as well as be completely anonymous which then gives the bullies more

ammunition to harass their victims more (Shelton). I expressed the effects of cyberbullying

which can most likely lead to suicide which is an extremely dark topic that most people do not

want to deal with. The lasting effects that bullying can leave on a childs life is insane and the

fact that cyberbullying is so consistent and seeming to be never-ending, it makes it difficult for

teens to get away which can lead to consequences of possible suicide (Shelton). The last essay I

chose was the Juvenile Life Without Parole. This essay was one of the last ones written in second

semester, so it shows my complete improvement. Even though this essay took much thought and

preparation due to the fact that I had no real opinion, it forced me to do research in order to

understand the topic better. I came to conclusion that juveniles should not be sentenced to life

without parole and should be given the opportunity to grow up and rehabilitate (Shelton). In this

essay, I used a wide variety of evidence as well as counter evidence to help support my thesis. I

also portrayed the many alternatives and the life changing events that could have caused the
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child to do something so horrific. While murder is no excuse, juveniles should be given the

opportunity to change their life around. Throughout the Juvenile Justice essay, I used vocabulary

with bad connotation towards juveniles being sentenced in order to persuade and force the reader

to understand my specific side on the situation.

Not only did my improvements throughout the year help me with the writing of the

essays, the process work had a significant impact as well. The Into the Wild Journals, the outline

of the problems with food, and the Brave New World literary circle discussion charts, assisted

me into getting the grade I did on each of the essays. The Into the Wild Journals were extremely

helpful when writing that specific essay especially since it was an in-class timed write and that

was the only tool we had to use. In the Journals, I wrote different quotes, in which they were

color coded to show the wide variety of adjectives that Chris McCandless conveyed. Also, I

separated the quotes into chronological to show the series of events throughout the novel. Next, I

chose to show the outline of the problems with food in 2017 because it truly shows the issues

that people all over America have with anorexia, bulimia, orthorexia, and binge eating. These

diseases are deadly and often go unnoticed, therefore, my group and I presented this to our class

to really show the importance of healthy eating and the symptoms and effects those disease could

leave one with. This helped me understand the topic better and forced myself to research and

then educate my peers. Lastly, I used the literary circle discussion charts to convey the

importance of the quotes throughout my Brave New World essay. I mainly used the Literary

Luminary when it came to quotes because I focused on how their dystopian world is different

from our world and government in America. Doing these lit circles every day in class helped

with the writing of the essay and made it easier to find quotes because some of them were

already written down.

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Through all the work that was previously discussed, I made major improvements when

creating thesis, finding evidence to support my claims, and using proper sentence structure.

Throughout my course in ERWC, I have also learned how to effectively integrate quotes as

shown in the Bullying essay, where I stated that twitter is another well-known social media site

where 15,000 bullying tweets [are] shared daily, according to the Huffington post (No

Bullying). This shows improvement on quote integration because it flows and does not simply

state, the author said. Another improvement I made was finding evidence to support my claim.

Not only did I use strong evidence with the proper vocabulary, I used statistics to show the exact

evidence. In the Bullying essay, I started of by stating that 92% of teens report going online at

least once a day which means with an increase in online activity, there is more room to witness

or be a victim of cyberbullying (Rawhide). This shows that I used my skills to research and

understand the topic as well as integrate it into the essay properly.

The strengths I succeed in the most are MLA format as well as the thesis that is the

backbone for the whole paper. Throughout my extensive use of MLA format, I have never run

into an issue formatting my paper to MLA, with 12 point font in Times New Roman, keeping the

correct distance on the margins, double spaced, and correctly citing the author's last name and

page numbers. I am capable of constructing a clear and powerful thesis when it comes to writing

essays and I am able to find the correct evidence to constantly reference back to the thesis

throughout the essay. I am able to state the position I take on the situation as well as keeping my

own personal opinion and pathos out of the essay. However, one of my weaknesses is the ability

to differentiate between ethos, logos, and pathos, as well as integrate and use them into the essay

itself. Another weakness I have is my commentary. I need to work on making sure it is longer

than the quote, and therefore, providing insightful information to the reader.
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After completing the Into the Wild process word, I learned how to effectively create and

construct a thesis that was the backbone for the whole paper. I carefully highlighted each of the

adjectives that described Chris McCandless and it helped me to choose the best possible

description of him. Also, it helped me analyze my quotes in order to prove my thesis correct. For

example, Surprisingly, Instead of feeling distraught over this turn of events, moreover,

McCandless was exhilarated: He saw the flash flood as an opportunity to shed unnecessary

baggage (Krakauer 29). This demonstrates how he was an outcast and it perfectly identifies the

certain category that will show support for the thesis.

During the course of ERWC this year, my ability to write on the spot has improved

tremendously. I have always had a love for writing, however, this year it has grown drastically. I

have improved on the timed writes given in class and the prep work that has to be done before in

order to create a strong essay under a time constraint. Obviously, there is always room for

improvement.

All in all, ERWC has taught me many helpful skills that will be carried about and used

throughout my life. I am able to easily find and integrate quotes into my essays. Not only did this

help me in ERWC, it helped me in my Government class when having to write DBQs and

provide supporting evidence and site where it was pulled from. Based on what I have heard from

previous ERWC students, it will help me in college and with my future career.