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Juan Guerrero

Professor Bustamante

ENGL 1302 401

7 August 2023

Essay 3 Reflection Essay

There were a lot of things that I learned in this assignment regarding academic research.

One of the most notable things was the ability to quickly look up for new sources to replace the

old sources that were no longer of use to me in a very short about of time. I learned how to

optimize my search, and pin down the specific key words that would help me find the right

sources to use. The various handouts and outlines that you provided were of a great help when it

came to zeroing in on the most important things to look for. The outline assignments and the

Managing Sources assignments where of a great help, especially the Managing Sources

assignment, which helped me figure know if a source from my old list could be useful by going

off the summary in the Annotated Bibliography. The Thesis Statement Checklist was also

helpful.

There were a few things that I was able to translate from the Research Analysis essay into

the Position Essay. The most obvious thing would be that I could analyze what an article wanted

to say, and from there I could see if it was applicable to what I wanted to say, and from there

figure out if it could be used as a source to back up my position in the argument. I feel that what

I learned from the previous essay I learned from the actual research and reading I did, rather than

the any one of the assignments that you assigned. Although I’m sure that there was something

that helped me out, and I just can’t remember. But one thing that likely helped were all the Peer
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Review assignments, since it is the similar idea, trying to figure out what the author is trying to

say, although there it is to help a peer and not to quote them on something.

Having to create a Position essay helped me in a lot of ways and will help me with other

work to come. As I mentioned before, I learned to become a lot more efficient when it came to

choosing and reading articles to see if they were relevant to me. For how it helped me in my

writing, I have learned to better place the sources I am citing withing the paragraphs in ways that

are no longer as intrusive or sudden, as well as now knowing the proper way to establish the

topic sentence for a paragraph. It’s an easy question to answer how having written a position

essay now will help me in the future, because if something like this ever comes up again, I will

know what to do, and will not feel lost or confused. And the things I will have to do then, I will

be able to with far more efficiently.

There were a lot of things that were changed by the feedback I received from you. Most

importantly, it was that I was not properly setting up what a paragraph was going to be about in

the topic sentence. I had to go back into the final draft for essay 3 and rewrite the topic sentences

so that they would explicitly mention what I was going to talk about. Another thing that you also

helped me with was making sure that the paragraph was smooth, and that citations were

transitioning properly. For this I had to go back to the essay 2 and make sure that I was placing

the citations properly, and that the two citations did not just abruptly appear and cut off the flow

of the paragraph. One last thing that wasn’t as clear, yet still helped me, was that I wasn’t really

connecting the paragraphs in essay 3 to the main argument of the paper. While this was

commented on in the first draft, which was more of a crude outline than a proper draft, it was

something that helped me improve my essay, and likely save it as well.

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The Peer-reviews that I received from my classmates were likely the least helpful parts of

feedback I received. Not by any chance because they were bad, but because the peer-review only

ever happened for the first draft, and my first drafts served more as outlines with stand-in

citations and parathesis saying what I should add later; due to that fact, there was not a lot of

feedback that could be done. But I did receive a good piece of feedback for essay 3, and it helped

me realize that my introduction was not as clear as I had originally thought, and indeed needed

some more work to make it properly state my thesis and introduce the reader to what the paper

was going to be about.

The most challenging aspect of these assignments is always the same thing, just getting

the motivation to do the things I need to do. It is easy to get distracted, or to choose to do the

work of another class, but once I get to working on the essay, I keep going until I finish and

hardly ever take breaks. The closest thing to something within the essay itself that seemed

difficult is expanding on the outlines I set up sometimes, as I give so little to go on that

sometimes I forget what I was supposed to do and have to develop that portion all over again.

The least challenging like I said is just writing the essay, it just comes to me once I start. The

citations were also very easy this time around, given the way that I structured my essay, I doubt I

misquoted anything.