Hinojosa 1

Diego E. Hinojosa Saldaña

Dr. Sharity Nelson

English 1301

May 6th, 2024

Final Reflective Essay

The knowledge I acquired during the English course regarding the writing process has

been useful and practical for my academic development. The writing process instilled in me from

this course is about methodical actions: crafting a text requires an outline and plans to conceive

the highest quality possible. The homework made me understand this outlining need; for

example, all the Project Management Worksheets, all the Analysis Worksheets, and all the

Analysis Outline work towards methodical planning of one’s moves to make quality writing. The

Project Management Worksheets serve as a reminder by listing the conditions and schedule of

the unit’s work, the Analysis Worksheets are a list of the analyzed media’s broken-down

elements convenient to use as a reference point for the essays, and the Analysis Outlines are the

essays’ planned structures. All my work in this course made me more proficient at outlining,

brainstorming, writing, proofreading, and elaborating texts. The course teachings improved my

working rate towards writing papers; for instance, writing laboratory reports, laboratory journals,

extra credit papers, and projects were improved in quality thanks to the course materials and

procedures. The brainstorming and outlining processes are faster and less time-consuming as I

now can accommodate the information I want to show to my audience and the structure of the

essay before even writing anything down, so when I’m outlining the essay most of the time, I

already have the essay’s skeleton without putting much time on it. My writing also influences the
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quality of scripts. In the middle of April, I created a speech script I had to recite at a roundtable

discussion, which was successful and praised for its high quality.

I learned how to meticulously dissect the media elements we work on in the three units of

the course. I took every aspect of the media analyzed as a quotable element to explore in my

essays, elaborating only on the elements that had a high presence inside the media to make my

work more convenient and flesh out. The Genre Analysis Worksheet had a combination of

quoted material and design choices explained in search for a plausible purpose of the analyzed

media, in this case, a pamphlet regarding IT support. In said analysis, I assigned an orientation

and order to the pages of the pamphlet and, from there, analyzed its contents, explaining in detail

the composition and possible purpose of the design and structure of its paragraphs. The Visual

Analysis Worksheet relied on a written in-depth description of the image elements to search the

author’s messaging audience. I had to describe the elements considering their location, contrast,

size, color, orientation, and appearance in relation to other elements. I separated the image into

three different layers: foreground, background, and illumination, and went from there. The

Rhetorical Analysis Worksheet was simple yet time-consuming because the analyzed media was

a peer-reviewed journal. I identified its main argument and used the rhetorical resources that I

considered had a greater impact on supporting the article’s point. These three works made me

reutilize my knowledge of general comprehension skills and therefore made me more capable of

understanding the purpose and messaging of the media around me and the contents of my other

courses, for example, New York Articles regarding immigration for my Univ class.

The revision was made upon my worst work by my instructor’s advice because it’s the

work that will show a greater transformation that the audience could notice and compare to the

original document accessible to them in my portfolio. The knowledge acquired during this
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process was an acknowledgment of my past mistakes in my first essay making. The choices

made to improve said work were the erasure of two useless and unimportant paragraphs for

space, the inclusion and improvement of topic sentences, and more in-depth explanations related

to topic sentences. I erased two whole paragraphs because I needed space to elaborate on the

other paragraphs, and honestly, I didn’t want to elaborate on those two; erasing them was

simpler. I added topic sentences and more sentences explaining them because of my instructor’s

feedback, as she pointed out these lacking qualities were the flaws of my essay. The topic

sentences talked about the structure and design of the pamphlet rather than the contents of the

pamphlet, relating all paragraphs with one another. The explanatory sentences elaborated on the

new topic sentence points relating the pamphlet structure with its content and establishing a

possible purpose from the author’s intentions towards its audience. The thing I learned during

this revision is that I lacked focus. I input a lot of information without any elaboration,

overwhelming my essay with pointless and disorganized information and hurting my work

quality. The course has polished my abilities to avoid as much as possible these mistakes, which

I’m grateful for.

While revising the genre analysis, I had to deal with two challenges: reunite the will to do

the work and think about how to fix something so hideous. The first challenge is self-

explanatory; I needed to gather the strength to look at my previous work, for I didn’t want to

look back into the cringeworthy attempt at writing I did. I had to overcome my disgust towards

my most flawed work during the semester and fix it. The second problem was to come up with a

way to patch the essay into something merely acceptable. At first, I was perplexed, standing

unsure of how to proceed as many of the things I wrote in the essay were pointless and didn’t add

up to something substantial. I was in denial, hoping not to have to come up with a solution that
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implied restructuring all the paragraphs, but I ended up doing it. The least challenging aspect

during the revision was choosing which paragraph to eliminate and to conserve, as a great

percentage of the essay’s content was already unapologetically pointless. I eliminated from the

essay two paragraphs talking about the pamphlet content, specifically OIT services because I

already had three other paragraphs dealing with similar content; erasing them was more

convenient to fulfill the rest of my instructor’s feedback. Another less demanding action was the

addition of sentences that elaborated on the topic sentences; choosing the topic sentences was the

hard part, but dancing around the idea was not so much.

I establish the three major semester concepts, genre, visual, and rhetorical analysis, as

three units with multiple activities and assignments designed to make the student more proficient

at reading comprehension and writing composition. The genre analysis, I describe as the

choosing of a template to show information in a way that is convenient and easy to understand

for the target audience, judging the design choices involved in the presentation of the

information. The visual analysis I presented was a breakdown of aesthetic elements in search of a

message or purpose from the author, evaluating the composition’s effectiveness at conveying the

message. The rhetorical analysis, I explained as an identification of persuasive resources used by

the author intended to convince the audience of an idea or position, assessing their persuasive

effectiveness. The techniques that I used to expose the essays and homework to a general

audience on my website is to present my work in two paragraphs, one in which I dissociate

myself as much as possible from my work and another where I talk in-depth about the quality,

techniques, content, my opinion, and the instructor’s feedback. I am explaining it fundamentally

for what it is, what it expects from the average student enrolled in the course and its academic

purpose. Concerning the drafts and reflections, I explained them by stating what they were, what
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they attempted to analyze, what they conveyed, and what they expected from the students.

Regarding homework and activities, I explained their purpose, content, materials utilized, and the

learning involved in them.

In the English semester, I found new challenges to overcome, some more difficult than

others. One of the challenges I faced during the semester was adapting myself to the formatting

of the course essays. I wasn’t familiar with the MLA format, so I had to research for days

information regarding MLA formatting and citations so I could start writing the draft. Another

challenge in the course was the prohibited use of AI-powered proofreading tools, except for

Word spellchecking, which was time-consuming. I had to dedicate more hours to meticulously

reading my work paranoically and even ask people around to read my drafts to find mistakes I

couldn’t, either because of my blindness or ignorance. This process of proofreading could take

one to two hours per significant modification of the draft, making it a challenge to keep quality at

the risk of running out of time for everything else because English is my only responsibility. This

problem is present even while making it reflection, leaving aside it is significantly longer than

any other document done during the semester, the portfolio overall is thousands of words long,

and having to proofread all that is incredibly tedious, time-consuming, and nerve-racking as I

have to keep the quality of the project while making time to review the semester contents of my

other courses to present my finals. I did my work even with these setbacks and challenges,

maybe not in a successful or high-quality way, but made to the best output of my abilities.

The semester wasn’t all problems and challenges; there was breathing room here and

there. Specifically, the homework and quizzes were the breathing room because they were easy

and short, something significantly faster than writing essays. The quizzes could be interpreted as

long because they require you to read chapters to answer them, but all of them are generally
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common sense; combine that fact with the multiple attempts, and you have a task that can be

done in ten minutes without problem. The homework isn’t difficult either, and most of the time,

it is just a minor inconvenience if you don’t have the will to do it. The homework is practical in

the long run because it doubles as a task organizer disguised as homework; doing it is convenient

as it gathers information applicable to the essay. I found the homework incredibly useful as most

of the content of my essays was already developed in the homework, just more elaborated once I

started writing the drafts. Another fact that made my life more convenient was that there were no

lectures during the essay writing period, giving me a free hour of my day to sit in the darkness of

the classroom with nothing but my thoughts and my laptop while I waited for my others classes,

might sound like I’m crazy and weird, I will not deny it maybe I am, but it makes me more

effective to work in solitude in an empty dark space. I’m not saying the semester was a

cakewalk, but everything has calm moments.

The remaining point to reflect in this lengthy aggrupation of words called essay is to

answer the question: has this course prepared me to be part of the academic writing community?

Yes, it has. The course has given me the tools to comprehend, analyze, deconstruct, and write

texts, preparing me to incorporate myself into the university academic system. The activities

have taught me the value of careful organization when setting up my outlines, increasing the

effectiveness of my brainstorming and planning when starting a paper. I have been deprived of

AI tools, making it workable to keep a certain level of quality under these conditions. The

necessity to keep up with all my responsibilities while writing for this project has increased my

proficiency in time management. My composition and writing improved with the advice of my

instructor’s conferences and peer discussions. The course has strengthened my writing skills and

work procedure into a more professional and effective ability set. I feel prepared to incorporate
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into the university system, using the citing criteria and rhetorical awareness instilled in me by the

course material and my instructor’s explanation. I am grateful to Dr. Sharity Nelson for the

lectures she has given me and for the time she has dedicated to reading my uninteresting and

flawed work to correct me.