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Blanca Ramirez

Professor Briones

English 1302-228

2 May 2024

My English 1302 Experience

At the end of the freshman year of college, I am expressing gratitude to have been

allowed to learn from Professor Briones at Texas A&M International University in Laredo,

Texas and I will share my experience with others who come across the website I designed to

summarize the course. Having Professor Briones guide me through English 1301 and English

1302 impacted my writing tremendously. I have realized that the help of my peers and being

surrounded by a phenomenal group of individuals allowed me to learn from them as well.

English is an essential field of study since many people go on to become writers and publish

papers in journals, newspapers, and other publications that help people learn about research and

strengthen the public. I have discovered various strategies to improve my writing ability

while authoring the essays for each of the three parts of the English 1302 course. An

important initial phase in developing an essay on an issue of interest is to conduct academic

research. When researching academic research to argue my claim on Child Protective Services

(CPS), I was able to access various papers that addressed the drawbacks of the agency. My

allegations against CPS would not have been supported had I not researched to obtain reliable

data and information. It was easier for me to analyze my academic research after creating an

annotated bibliography. Academic research has many implications, as I have come to

understand throughout the course. For instance, in science, research plays a major part in the
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advancement of healthcare science, technology, and the search for solutions for incurable

illnesses.

I have learned throughout this course that writing is not a perfect process most of the

time. Before submitting a final draft, several steps need to be conducted to ensure that the essay

is worthy of an A. You need to explore ideas before attempting to write an essay to choose topics

that will work for your argument. I explored a wide variety of issues for my CPS essay, including

people of color, disadvantaged mothers, and cases that are determined not to require further

investigation. Using the data I had obtained from gathering ideas, I researched to find ten articles

that would support my claims. In addition, I wrote an initial draft that outlined all my ideas,

which I then revised before submitting the final copy. Understanding the importance of drafts

and brainstorming to write a compelling essay made it clear to me that no steps in the writing

process should be skipped. My writing has improved as a result of the writing process, which

gave me numerous opportunities to proofread and ensure that my writing makes sense to

persuade readers of my point of view. For instance, I would not have known what to write about

during my draft if I had not had a thought process and gathered topic areas. Giving my audience

accurate information required me to go through a process to make sure the articles I found were

credible and relevant.

Having the option to revise one of my final drafts was amazing to me because it allowed

me to go back to any final draft and fix it once and for all. Although throughout every essay unit,

we had multiple checkpoints having a final one encourages me to go back to my writing and

see for myself how much I have grown since the first unit of English 1302. I received a final

grade of 98 or above on each one of my essays; therefore, I decided to not revise a final

draft since I was satisfied with my 3 overall grades. If I had an essay to revise, I would highly
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depend on my professor and peer feedback to help me see my mistakes and make them better.

One of my most common mistakes when writing an essay is correctly citing the authors of an

article. Throughout my English course experience, I have learned how to fix that mistake with

the help of feedback. Another mistake I tend to make is getting involved in my writing and

proceeding with giving my opinion on a certain topic. For example, in my essay about Child

Protective Services, I got very into my writing and started to give an opinion along with my data

and sources.

Since I did not revise a final reflection for this website, I will go more into

depth about the process of revising the 3-unit essays for English 1302. For essay 1 the annotated

bibliography the most challenging aspect of revising was making sure to cite the articles in the

correct MLA format to reduce copyright. The least challenging part of revising the annotated

bibliography was writing a summary for each given article and explaining the data and research

findings for each 10 different articles. In essay 2 I wrote a Literature Review on 8 peer-reviewed

articles and discussed how they were relevant to my topic of a corrupt system. The most

challenging aspect of revising this essay was making sure not to plagiarize. Having to go more

in-depth with my research made it harder for me not to plagiarize. For the essay, when I quoted a

phrase the authors discussed in the article, I had to cite every author. In my first draft, I did not

know how to cite the authors but with the help of feedback from my instructor, I was able

to make the revision and cite the authors correctly. The least challenging aspect was writing the

essay because it discussed the article and my thoughts. I could give an opinion on why it was

relevant to my study. In essay 3 I wrote a research-positioned essay discussing my research

and my counterargument. When revising this essay, the most challenging aspect was making sure

not to change the research done by the authors to correspond with my data. Other than that, essay
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3 was the easiest essay to write as it was all about backing up my claim that CPS is a corrupt

system.

In addition to the making of this website, there were some choices I had to make to

communicate course concepts such as academic research and the writing process. To be able

to communicate academic research I made a tab for my first essay which is the annotated

bibliography that covers my academic research. The writing process is discussed at the beginning

of this essay, and it helps my audience gather an idea of how and why the writing process is

crucial when conducting an essay. For each one of my essays, I wrote a summary discussing each

prompt to make it understandable for my audience who may have no clue about the genres. For

the annotated bibliography, I briefed that it is an essay that covers articles. For each article

chosen, it must be cited and summarized to help me and the reader get an idea about what each

article is about. For the literature review, it is an essay that is conducted to allow me the writer to

give relevance to my topic of discussion and combine it with the research that is studied in each

article. A literature review is like an annotated bibliography with the only difference being that

the writer can input the relevance of the topic along with the work of the original articles. The

research-positioned essay is an essay that covers my counterargument on CPS. With the research

I gathered I combined it with my thoughts on how to resolve a specific issue to make the

organization better. Each summary in each essay tab is crucial to my audience to allow them

to grasp the idea of what they will be reading to better help them understand the viewpoint.

English has always been one of my fine subjects; however, everybody including me can

find some struggles along the way. The most challenging aspect of this course was time

management. As someone who tends to procrastinate quite often over the time of the course, it

caught up to me. There were times when I would be writing my final drafts hours before the due
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time and putting loads of pressure on myself. Although my professor gave me days to prepare

an essay I would be hustling a draft at the last minute. Eventually, I had to juggle writing essays,

submitting tests for other courses, and doing homework assignments which put me under a lot

of stress. One of the challenges I faced in the research process was finding new articles that

related to my topic that would allow me to have a strong argument. It took me a couple of days to

find 10 articles that related to my topic but with the motivation to support the children of the

system and spread awareness I made sure to use the best articles. During the writing

process, some challenges I faced were finding topics to discuss within my research. For example,

these are some of the topics I picked to discuss: poor mothers, people of color, rereported cases,

uninvestigated cases, and teenagers in the system at risk of homelessness. With hours of

brainstorming, I was able to come up with many ideas to discuss to back up my argument.

With that being said, the least challenging aspect of this course was putting together a

final draft once I had all the information and data, I needed to back up my argument. For each

essay unit, the writing process was a first draft, instructor/ peer feedback, and then the final draft.

Furthermore, by the time I conducted my final draft, I had relevant feedback and ways to fix my

first draft to make it final draft material. One of the strengths I discovered in my research and

writing skills was that I can be a great writer if I put my mind and time into it. As I mentioned

before, the research process took me a couple of days to gather, but in the end, I was able to

gather articles that made me more intrigued with my topic. Looking back at the beginning of

the course I have realized how much I have grown as a writer by learning from this

course. Rereading my first draft of English 1302 was embarrassing at the least but looking at my

final draft of the course I am beyond proud of myself and the work I can produce with the right

mentality.
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Writing is something that everybody needs to understand because in almost all careers it

is necessary to use writing. For example, scientists write lab reports, doctors write patient notes,

teachers write agendas, lawyers write case stories, and the list goes on and on. Research is

also important in life because without research the world would never improve. With everything

I have learned in this course I believe that it will benefit me in the future. I would have never

imagined how much an English course would be able to impact my career. With my topic on

Child Protective Services, doing research in this course has encouraged me to want to make a

stand. With everything I learned through my research, I understand how corrupt and misleading

this organization is for parents and children. I want to go further into research and learn more

about my topic and other topics as well. There are many things you can discover by doing

research and that is something that keeps me going to want to find out what is not known to

society. I would want to become part of the academic research community because doing the

little research during the course has encouraged me to want to go deeper to uncover more details.

I am glad to say that I will no longer have to write essays until the doctoral program, but

I am sad to say that I will miss this course. The people I met and having an impactful professor

have allowed me to open up and grow as an individual. I will use all the strategies I learned

throughout the course to help guide me in the future in school and my career. In the future, I

will look back and remind myself that without this course I would never have become a decent

writer or a researcher. I am beyond grateful to have learned from Professor Briones at Texas

A&M International University and I will never forget how much she impacted my career.