Clarissa Quigley

Period 2

English 1010

Reflective Essay

In English 1010, I was required to write two major essays: a rhetorical analysis, and a

flash narrative. As well as a civic engagement project. Throughout the semester while writing

these pieces, I learned so much about the research and writing process. In this essay, I will be

reviewing all three and what I learned from each and how my perspective of writing, as well as

my topics, have changed.

For my rhetorical analysis, I was told to find an article related to what I wanted my topic

for my civic engagement project to be. So I found an article called “How Abortion Laws in the

U.S. Compare to Those in Other Countries”. I chose abortion as my initial topic because I’ve

always had strong beliefs that abortion is wrong. Writing this essay was pretty difficult for me, I

couldn’t understand what, exactly, was expected of me. But I was able to complete it and I was

really proud of what I had submitted. As for the steps that it took to get to that point, I studied the

article so intensely and really made sure that I understood the content. Then I began the writing

process. Like I said, it was really difficult, but I pursued and didn’t give up. I got some advice

from a friend who was always really good at writing essays to help me, which was extremely

helpful and I learned a lot from him. When I was revising this essay, I never really had any

difficulty with grammatical errors, but I just really wanted to make sure that what I wanted to say

came across clearly to the audience. So I read it out loud to make sure it sounded right, and had

my dad and brother read it. Again, overall, I’m very proud of the essay that I submitted.
 The next essay I wrote was the flash narrative, which is a story from my childhood. I

decided to write about an experience I had that was “near-death” in my head. I chose this story

because it’s one of the only distinct memories I have from my childhood, and I tell it a lot. The

fact that I tell it a lot made writing it an easy decision to make. As for the execution, I wasn’t

sure how to go about it. I remember a lot, but there’s still a lot of spots that I don’t remember, so

it made it hard to compile a whole story. But I started with writing down everything that I could

remember and filling in the holes with dialogue that didn’t actually happen, or just adding more

details. When I wrote the revision, I briefly rewrote the story and used that as a fill-in to either

replace or add to my original story. Overall, I think I portrayed the story in a way that made the

audience feel how I was feeling in that situation.

The project I did for my civic engagement project was about sex education. Like I said

before, I was wanting to do my project on abortion. But while I was researching, I found that

making abortion illegal in the US, or anywhere, would be very fatal. While you can’t make

everyone happy, you can keep people alive. So I thought it through and came to the conclusion

that abortions are done because of the people that don’t want the baby. But they got pregnant by

accident, so maybe improving the sex education system is the right track to take instead. So I

decided to do my civic engagement project on sex education. I wrote a letter to the governor of

Utah, Governor Cox, about this problem and what the solution is. I did a massive amount of

research for this project and I am very proud of the outcome.

In conclusion, I plan to use the skills that I used from each of these projects in my future

college career. I learned a lot of researching techniques and how to write a complete and full

essay. I’m overall very proud of the work that I have done this semester.