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Hugo F Hernandez

ENGL 1301

Dr. Sharity Nelson

5 December 2023

Final Reflection Essay

Through the ENGL 1301 course, in my first semester at TAMIU, I have learned new skills

that will allow me to be a more skillful and efficient writer. This was thanks to the fact that in

the course with Dr Nelson, we have gone through various procedures that helped us to be

able to write intelligently. Brainstorming, for example, is an activity as simple as it is basic,

but if you don't have the habit of doing it you can suffer a lot when you want to write your

essay or do any type of activity. Brainstorming was a pillar for my writing learning this

semester and, although I didn't use it much in my first essay, I was able to take advantage of

the strategy in my second and third essays, which opened my mind to various options and

ideas of what I would write about. my essay and how it would develop. And just as it is

important to start with a good brainstorm, you have to have good feedback to conclude ideas

and correct errors. At first, I was very sorry for this activity, the fact that others saw what I

wrote was unthinkable to me, but as the semester progressed, I was able to see that this

activity was necessary. For example, I still remember when in essay number three, I thought I

was developing my essay well since I had only found one rhetorical appeal in my article,

Logos. But when I went to my instructor to provide me feedback I noticed that there were

many details that I was missing that could easily be pathos and ethos. After that feedback

activity, I was able to restructure my essay and make it much better. These activities, just as

they helped me in my ENGL 1301 course, were also of great help in my other courses, such

as UNIV 1201 where I also had to do an essay and make my e-portfolio, and also in CHEM
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LAB 1111 where The organization and planning of ideas before working with chemicals was

crucial for the proper development of my laboratory skills and my learning. Thus, the ENGL

1301 course has given me knowledge not only to be able to write an essay, but also to be able

to organize, develop, and complete easily and with less stress the challenges that arise in

daily and academic life.

Furthermore, during the semester we also learned text and image analysis skills so that we

could later write essays based on those analyses. Genre, location, audience, and rhetorical

analysis are just some of the characteristics that I learned to analyze this semester that

allowed me to have a good structure for my essay. Among the many analysis activities we did

before starting our tests were the "Genre Analysis Worksheet", "Visual Text Analysis

Worksheet" and "Rhetorical Analysis Outline Worksheet" These are examples of tasks that

helped me improve my analytical skills since we had to analyze our source of what we would

do the essay, whether we were looking for the genre, the meaning of a visual element, or

rhetorical appeals (a brochure, an image or an article), we ordered all its components and

explained them, This gave us a broader and clearer vision of what we were analyzing, and

then we made a thesis, which gave rise to our essay. These activities were useful to me not

only in writing an essay but also to be able to solve problems in other courses since it feels

like breaking down the entire problem and solving it step by step, understanding what is

happening, and not just doing things for the sake of doing them. In this way, this course has

helped me solve problems and I hope to be able to use these methods during my studies and

my professional career because when you think about it, it is not much different from

scientific methods to create hypotheses.

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Continuing, the feedback from our instructor was more than an activity. It was a tool that we

could use to improve many aspects of our essays. The essay where I can best say that I

changed everything drastically, thanks to the feedback from my instructor, was essay number

three, in which I changed the essay so much that I even added another body paragraph. First,

my instructor helped me focus my essay on the main topic. I had to recognize what the article

wanted to say and how they persuaded the audience about it using rhetorical appeals

“Throughout the article, to persuade readers that their research is reliable, the authors make

good use of tables and diagrams that help affirm its main argument complemented by highly

qualified people to provide this information, in turn these data and people mentioned in the

article create emotions of trust in readers.” (Essay 3 Final draft, page 1) . Once I understood

that, I had to identify the various rhetorical appeals in the article, in which my instructor also

gave me clues to guide me. After identifying everything, I was able to rewrite my essay and

connect it to the main idea. I was also able to complete it by adding a third body paragraph.

This was just one example of many in which Dr Nelson helped us with his feedback to

improve our compositions, so I can say that it was a necessary activity for the development of

our learning in the ENGL 1301 course.

With that said, possibly the most difficult thing about reviewing that essay in the end was

being able to identify those appeals that I couldn't see since to do so I had to read the article

again to be able to confirm my search. After that, I had to verify that the argument I was

making made sense with the evidence, and if the evidence was telling me that the authors

were using the rhetorical appeals I chose to persuade. After that, possibly the easiest part of

the final revision was writing it, even though I had to rewrite a complete paragraph, change

the thesis, and the conclusion, and add another paragraph, writing, in the end, was the easiest
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since the idea I already had it, all I had to do was express it and I could have written much

more, but I don't like to make essays too long because I can get off topic.

For my e-portfolio assignment, I make sure to include the necessary components so that any

visitor to the page who is not part of the class or who is not familiar with the program can

understand it, I make sure to include the documents visible to viewers, images of what we

analyzed in rehearsals, explanations of the changes I made either on my own or through

feedback, and of course the feedback itself. Each section of my portfolio speaks for itself and

has its context making it easier for readers to navigate the site and gather information. I

would have liked to be able to personalize it more to my liking and add some images and

animations to make it more my style, but I better go with the formal and functional side, and

that way it is easier to read everything.

As I have already mentioned before, during this course we analyzed various images and

documents, so analysis skills had to be developed. However, despite being able to see a photo

and analyze it, during the course, I had some difficulty expressing what the authors wanted to

say with their compositions or advertisements. A clear example of this was when I was

writing essay number three, in which I was analyzing an article that talked about how the

consumption of a plant can help reduce the probability of having cancer. The concept is

simple, but once reading the article there was so much information that it was difficult for me

to understand what the authors were selling to me. Another aspect that I found difficult when

taking this course was my writing, since I was in high school I was not very good at writing

in English, since my first language is Spanish, and although I know some punctuation rules, it

is not enough to that my texts look dull, and added to the fact that I come from high school a

little rusty because I didn't write for a long time, it didn't help me much, but I will improve as
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I go. A third aspect was my communication skills. Many of the challenges I had during the

course could have been avoided if I had only communicated with a classmate or my

instructor, but out of shame I simply went on the difficult side. And finally, possibly the worst

of all, my time management, this is more my fault than anything else, I think this first

semester was a good reality check to gently remind me that this is not high school, and that

possibly my English teacher In highschool I put a hundred in my essays so that his class

wouldn't look bad, the point is that managing my time and be productive in my second

semester will be a priority, so as not to suffer like I did in this first semester.

In contrast to the above, the thing I had the least difficulty within this course was writing. I

know it sounds contradictory, but removing everything about grammar and its rules, I like to

write. I am a person who can talk for hours and does not get tired, so I transmit that to my

writing, I simply talk to myself and translate everything on the keyboard, it is fun to a certain

extent because if I do not understand the whole topic, Just as I can talk a lot, I can suddenly

go blank. Another aspect of this course that was easy for me to understand was the activities,

such as brainstorming or Outline worksheets. I think that the activities were very dynamic

and easy to carry out. For example in essay number two, the fact of going on campus or

searching on the Internet and being able to analyze the image you want, I feel makes it much

easier for us to be able to compile that information that you ask of us, since we may already

be familiar with it. the subject of the photo. Those dynamic activities were what made the

difference and personally helped me understand more about the purpose of the activity. Also,

another aspect that I found easy in the course was the small quizzes that we did, since they

were just reading and answering, but that didn't make them any less important, since they

were informative.
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When I started this course, it was like starting over as a student writer, the reason is because

as I mentioned before, I went a long time without writing an essay or something similar. For

this reason, being in the ENGL 1301 course this semester was a new beginning, it introduced

me again to what it is not only to write an essay but to know how to organize my work

starting with the ideas I should have, organize them, structure them, have a broad overview of

all my resources to finally start with the main task. I am aware that the ENGL 1301 course

will help me a lot in my next classes, but the learning goes beyond just academics since the

strategies and lessons learned can also be used in life outside of school or even in work, for

example, in things like planning your day, organizing your house, in the social sphere, etc.

The ENGL 1301 course has helped me feel part of the TAMIU writing community, even

though I don't want to dedicate myself to writing and I don't even do it well, it inspires me to

continue improving. Another thing that is not very challenging in this course is feeling part of

it. In general, I had a good time analyzing and writing about it, especially about Elon Musk's

pose, it was fun to see how much information I can get from an article or an image, I hope to

be able to use all these tools and skills that I have learned during my studies and being able to

look back and realize how much I have improved in writing.

Work Cited

Essay 3 :The Rhetorical Effectiveness of Opportunities and Challenges of Kava in Lung

Cancer Prevention

Project Management Worksheet