Shamia Hossain

Professor Batty

December 12, 2019

Reflective essay

This was supposed to be my last semester in valley college but since I decided to major in

English I had to complete English 101 and either 102/103. Since I took English 103 last semester

I thought I would be done with English but then my counselor said this course (English 102) is the

prerequisite for all other English classes. This was surprising to me because writing and grammar

has always been one of my difficult zones since English is not my first language. When I first took

this class I thought I just should complete this as my prerequisite course and I just wanted to be

done with it. But, professor Batty has given me reason to focus on the lectures and activities by

making them so interesting. This semester has been full of growth in many ways; not only have I

transformed as a writer, but also as a critical thinker. As I’ve stated, I’m not a fan of the subject

English but for some unknown reason I chose this as my major without even thinking it twice.

Later on, in this semester I decided to change my major again and made psychology my major.

Taking this course not only helped me as an English writer but it helps writing for all other subjects

too.

The works we’ve done in this course for the past semester didn’t only help my writing

skills but also helped me understand my own weakness and strengths about writing. Since we did

many parts of literary analysis essay including a psychoanalytic essay and a queer theory I learned

a lot about these topics and got an idea about what the literary devices are. In these essays, we

didn’t analyze the essays based on the books only we also had to do some researches which
developed me as a reader too. Thanks to the writing center and net tutor for giving me such great

feedbacks which was life saver. It is always great to receive feedbacks from experts and mostly

from professors. I can’t deny the fact that professor Batty is one of the most responsive and

cooperative professor I’ve met till now. Due to my schedule timing, I couldn’t go to her office

hours but whenever I needed help she was just an email away.

Now let’s discuss the materials I’ve majored in through this class till now. From the

formatting till organization I’ve developed in every sector since I believe practice makes a man

perfect and I’ve been practicing my writing since English 028 till now. Figuring out how to activity

read the lyrics of a song, dramatizations, and books allocated in this course, to applying basic

deduction to break down the content in a variety of the artistic focal points. By taking this course

has not just helped me grow in the humanities, additionally set me up for my upper division

psychology courses. The expositions I have composed, considering verse, dramatization, and the

monster novel that I have read have helped shape my composition, by permitting me to consolidate

distinctive abstract of literary lenses in my essays. What I have additionally realized about myself,

as an author is my capacity to outline essays.

The things I learned for the first time in this class was about the quote sandwiching; before

I had no idea about it and how to do it. The outline we got for the essays were very specific and

easy to understand about what she expected us to write. The hardest essay for me in this semester

was the monster novel which was kind of a broad field to write about the human psyche and the

part of our minds that we all have in us. Another topic that was confusing to me was the graphic

novel where we created a novel ourselves in a group and wrote a simple reflection about it. This

thing was also very new to me; also, interesting because we got to learn a lot about how an author

writes their fiction or graphic books and how to write them.

 The one thing I realized throughout this course is a book is not for just reading it page to

page but it’s all about reading and making a connection with it. The reading journal was so helpful

for me because I could choose the lines or quotes that were important and I was also able to analyze

them in my own words. The drama was also interesting for me because I liked the idea of analyzing

it from queer theory lenses and make myself clearer about all these ideas and thought people have

about sexuality. Overall this whole semester I’ve learned a lot of new things which is going to help

me in my university very soon and I’m thankful to my fellow classmates who had been such a

great sport and last but not the least my Professor Ms. Batty who have made essay writing so

dramatic and interesting.