Julio Chapa

Dr. Jason Dew

English 1302-280

1 May 2023

Class Reflection

Writing is an essential part of everyone's lives as it is one of the primary forms of

expressing one's thoughts and feelings. Whether the writing is a letter, text message, or even a

writing assignment, it is used daily. In this English course, I learned how to make my writing

clear and compelling throughout the three essays we had to write. I learned many different things

from each paper, and in this reflection, I will explain what each essay taught me and the impact I

felt that it had on me as a writer overall.

In essay one, I applied and used what I had learned from English 1301. After I completed

the essay and got feedback, I learned how to do an experiment for an essay on how to

incorporate that type of evidence into my writing. The experiment I conducted opened up a

different point of view for the paper since I had my personal experience to compare to other

sources that were out there and that I used for my essay. From my feedback, I learned that my

strengths are my sentence structure and relevance to the topic. In contrast, my weaknesses are

grammar and spelling, similar to those I ended off on in 1301. Although I did learn some things,

I found some challenges: finding trustworthy sources because some of them seemed inaccurate,

but I improved that from this essay to the next.

In essay two, I applied the things I learned from my research in essay one to the study

conducted in essay two. I also used what I learned from my experiment in the experiments
conducted in the study I was viewing. Additionally, these past things that I applied to essay two,

new things I learned were how to run a neutral analytical essay and how to incorporate different

perspectives without being biased to one side. I also produced my first annotated bibliography,

which was very good as I learned more about my sources since I wrote about them in the

bibliography. My strengths in this essay were my topic sentences and thesis, as I was told in my

feedback. My weakness this time was my repetitiveness of words and making sentences too

wordy which I will also improve on, as I have seen in other writing assignments. The challenging

part of this essay was finding sources on both sides of the spectrum, which accompanied my

writing well. All these things that I learned from these two essays I improved on as I kept

writing.

Finally, in my third essay, I applied things from essays one and two to the third essay, as

the prompt of the third essay was an argumentative essay on the topic from the second essay. I

used previous research knowledge from essays one and two to apply to essay three and write the

argumentative essay. In this third essay, a new thing I learned to do was incorporate multiple

different sides to an argument to apply to my stance on the argument and support my claim on

what I think is right. Creating the statement for this essay overall impacted my writing positively

as I learned how to back up a stance and incorporate two sides to an idea to help me explain why

my view is correct. This time, my strengths were my introduction and relevance to the argument,

and my weakness was repetitive ideas and words. The last challenge I faced was finding sources

that complimented my opinion and allowed me to explain why my stance was correct and why I

felt that the other side of the argument was incorrect.

In conclusion, this course taught me a lot about my writing and has improved me even

more from 1301, and I can write more clearly and academically after completing this course. The
experience I gained from the three essays will help me for the rest of my college career, as I can

do a little bit of everything and express my thoughts and feelings on a topic through my writing.