CERDA 1

Alejandro Cerda

ENGL 1302

29 November 2022

Professor Briones

In my second year in college, I felt that this was a class that I enjoyed for a multitude of

reasons. I felt that this class was one that helped me not only in my writing skills but also in my

other courses. This class I felt was more challenging than previous English classes, and in a way

helped me grow as a writer. Although the class did not start in a conventional way, I did enjoy it

and had many positive things about the class.

Heading into the class I had a very negative perspective on English and writing in general

as I could never seem to truly be a good writer. I know that to be a good writer may seem a bit

much but even the simplest of things would come hard for me like to come up with ideas for the

prompt of the essay or trying to elaborate those ideas to help further my point were things that I

felt I’ve always had trouble with. Before the class started however, in my 1301 class helped me

to compress these writing setbacks as it helped me recognize certain mistakes, I was making in

the writing process. This helped me get better in writing essays as throughout my life I was

“really good at writing an OK essay” as one high school teacher told me. Going into this class I

was determined to get good at writing and make a big leap in my writing skills as I wanted to get

a higher grade then I did in my previous 301 class, and I set that as a goal for myself. I knew

that the class was going to consist of analyzing discourse from my previous professor in 1301,

but I had taken that class in person and wasn’t sure what to expect from an online class.

The beginning of the class was certainly one that I wasn’t used to as this was my first

online class that I felt was going to be challenging. I knew beforehand what some things I had to
 CERDA 2

do to be successful in the class like turn in assignments on time, keep up with readings, and to

look ahead into what will be due in the future. At first I was having trouble accessing the class

text book which frightened me because I wasn’t sure if I was the only one in my class deicing

with the same problem. I then went to the TAMIU bookstore to see if they could help me at least

get access to the book, but they were no real help. They gave me the solution of just emailing

my teacher and when I told them that he wasn’t responding they said that there wasn’t much they

could do. As it turned out luckily, I wasn’t the only other person dealing with these issues. I

contacted several of my classmates via private course message and they also said they were

having similar troubles with the textbook and contacting the professor. To then we all decided to

email our teacher with the group course message, and he still didn’t answer. It was about two

weeks since class started when we got a response, but not a very helpful one. It was also a

difficult class to navigate on blackboard because it seemed that the entire class was copied and

pasted from a previous class from 2017. Besides this first bump in the road the class was easy to

follow, and assignments were easy to understand and easy to tie back into the essays.

For the first major assignment which was essay one I felt was easy because I had a essay

topic that I was already curious about. I found it easy to come up with the topic I wanted to talk

about because the prompt was easy for me as I already had a test study of something that

interested me. The theory I wanted to research was called the Mostert effect which said that

music can help you study in remembering and holding the information which you study. When I

researched about this topic, I found that there was a lot of previous research that had been done

on this experiment, and this helped me with the research portion of the essay. As for putting the

theory into practice that was a little more difficult because to find a consistent form of

progression that is on the same weekly level was difficult because this was such a specific task to
 CERDA 3

be able to track together. So, it took some time, but I got to figure out who I wanted to use for

the research and how they would line up.

In the actual essay I felt it was easy for me to write down and present the findings I got as

I had all the information that I needed. While I was writing the essay, I felt that I had paragraphs

that were lacking and needed more depth and insight. For instance, this paragraph that I used at

the beginning of my essay saying “In my research I had two college students and my little

brother who is in 8th grade help me with the research. I had them single out a class in which they

are constantly taking some form of assignment, quiz, or test in which they can measure progress.

The instructions I had for them was to listen to some form of music when studying for the class

they have chosen and to report how they felt with the music playing along with their previous

scores. Then telling me about their scores since trying this new study method “. I felt that there

were some more details I could’ve written down in this paragraph like how the students previous

outlooks were in those subjects and how they were in other classes.

Another thing that I had trouble on that ended up being a consistent problem throughout

all three of my essays was my structure of the paragraphs as I would jump from one idea to

another and then branch back into a previous paragraph. For instance, the structure of essay one

went as the introduction in which I already had stated what the experiment entailed. Then I

introduced who was going to participate in the experiment and what instructions I had for them

to follow, and in the next paragraph I explained the research that I found on the mortar effect.

Then in the next three paragraphs I talked about each person’s experience with using the

experiment and their improvements and how the theory worked. Then ended with the conclusion,

but it what I found out in reviewing the essay was I should’ve introduced the peer review

research first and law down the foundation of the essay first then introduced who was going to
 CERDA 4

participate and how they were going to conduct the experiment. Another critique I had was that I

introduced the method too early as I included it in the introduction and that it didn’t help the flow

of the beginning of the essay and felt rushed. I didn’t get a lot of peers reviewing because the

original instructor was still not responding, and we were supposed to meet on collaborate to

discuss our essays. After the first essay I felt that my writing skills had stayed the same simply

because I didn’t have any feedback to go off on.

The easiest essay I felt I had was essay two because I not only had a plethora of information that

I was able to present on my issue, but also, I had plenty of assistance with the essay. For the

second essay I wrote about what humans can do to stop global warming and the effects that come

with global warming. I had asked 10 people their perspectives on what human can do to help

with global warming, and a got a multitude of answers which is used in the essay. As I wrote the

essay, I noticed that my essay didn’t seem like a study but more of an argument to what could be

done as I had only been talking about the solutions of global warming and not the other side of

the argument. So, when I realized this out, I mentioned it in my ace visit, and with the help of

my tutor we had come up with the idea of talking about the perspective of considering that to fix

global warming isn’t possible. During my ACE visit the concern was also brough up about my

paragraph structure because my tutor said I had many paragraphs that had too many different

topics I had written about. For instance, when I said

“Storms have also been more severe and frequent throughout the world over the last 50

years as natural hazards accounted for 50 percent of all disasters, 45 percent of all

reported deaths and 74 percent of all reported economic losses. This is due to more water

vapor in the atmosphere which influences extreme rainfall, flooding, and warming

oceans. Humans are also not the only species affected by global warming as there are
 CERDA 5

many fish and coral reefs being lost due to global warming, but the most affected animal

is the polar bear. Polar bears are going extinct because they need to create their dens on

land because the ice sheets that they live on are melting and cracking in the ocean forcing

them to move to land”.

This part of the paragraph felt very chaotic and as if I couldn’t make up my mind of what I

wanted to write. For the third essay I felt the information I had to present was very easy to

display and the way I wrote my essay was easy for me as well. Another thing that I had to be

adjusted was my citing and the use of quotes because I felt I used quotes to consistently and

often during the essay. After the second essay I felt like my writing ability improved a little

since I was able to identify certain mistakes and ways to fix the issues I had throughout the

essay.

For the third essay I found it was the hardest to write in terms of format but the easiest in

terms of information that I needed to present. During this essay I felt that turning over my

information from my previous essay into this one was very easy as most of my information from

the previous essay was helping my claim for the third essay. Although I still had to include more

information and citing for the essay this was still the easiest part of the third essay. Formatting

my essay was the most difficult part for me as I consistently ran into problems in sticking with

the format of my essay and when I should include certain pieces of information. In my ACE

visit my tutor pointed out that my information was well written but poorly placed. My tutor said

that I needed to work on my placement of information, because I had information during the end

of my essay that we both felt would’ve been better placed at the beginning which would set up

my argument better. This was the case for what ended up being the third paragraph of my essay

which was originally my final body essay in my rough draft. The third essay was a mixed bag
 CERDA 6

for me getting better as a writer because I felt I still had a lot of trouble with formatting, but I had

an easy time imputing the information I needed for the essay.

My experience for my second English class was a positive one and I felt my writing skills

did improve. Not only from formatting and grammar but also the quality of the content I wrote

and the quality of information I used throughout this class. I learned a lot from this class that I

could certainly apply to other classes of mine in the future in terms of formatting, citing, and

reviewing essays I write. This class was one that I feel I benefitted from a lot and certainly had a

good time while taking it.

 CERDA 7

Works Cited

Cerda, Alejandro. “Fixing Global Warming” October ,19 2022. English 1302, Texas A&M

International University, student paper

Cerda, Alejandro. “Music Saves Grades” September ,7 2022. English 1302, Texas A&M

International University, student paper