Juan Miguel Martinez

ENGL 1302; 223

Mr. Powers

6th May, 2024

Final Reflection Essay

Another school semester at Texas A&M International University has come and gone and

many memories, events, lessons, along with it. One of my fondest memories this school semester

was my English 1302 class with Mr. Keaton Powers. This class this semester was among one of

my favorite classes, the main reason being that he was a very approachable professor; more than

most of the other professors I have had. Not only was Mr. Powers funny yet approachable, but he

was also very knowledgeable with the discussions he had with us during class. Him being very

knowledgeable really helped me in writing essays, completing research assignments, and

completing work necessary to pass the class. Among these essays were the three major essays we

had to write, and that includes: the annotated bibliographies, the research analysis, and the

argumentative essay. With all these three essays completed and under my belt for this class, I can

say that I have learned a lot from these essays.

These past three papers I have written over the last couple months, have helped me to

really improve in my writing skills for future classes and future work assignments too.

Something new that I did learn was about annotated bibliographies and how to properly organize

information together in those bibliographies. Before I had taken this class, I had no clue

annotated bibliographies existed let alone how to write one and organize information, but Mr.

Powers really helped me understand what annotated bibliographies are, how to write them, and
how to gather and organize information properly. Not only that, but also the small assignments

we had about annotated bibliographies also helped me further grasp the skill necessary to write

one. Alongside the lessons, those assignments helped me by giving me examples to work on and

helped me gather information on the topic that I would write about in that bibliography. The

research analysis essay also helped me in improving my skill of gathering and organizing

information. The bibliographies introduced me to the skill of organizing information in a paper

properly so that it makes sense. But the research analysis essay helped me develop that skill even

further since research essays are really all about gathering and organizing research. Alongside the

bibliographies and research analysis essay, I also learned how to properly write a argumentative

essay, arguing about something related to my topic with the support of articles behind my back.

Before I took this class, I knew about argumentative essays, and have written some for my high

school English class, but those previous papers were not really that well-built or structured. Once

I took this class though, I learned how to properly structure an argumentative essay, and learned

how to gather information related to the argument I wanted to convey as well.

The process of writing is a difficult one and that includes writing anything. Whether it be

a news article, a book, a lab report, a paper documenting your findings on an experiment, or a

paper or essay needed for school, the writing process can be difficult and will take time in order

to learn and master. Before taking this course, I already had a pretty good grasp on the general

writing process that can be used for anything in writing, but the knowledge I obtained throughout

the course has helped me further refine this writing process and also taught me some new writing

processes I have not learned or known about before. The three main essay assignments really

helped with this writing process along with the reflection essays and the peer feedback as well.

The peer feedback really helped me by making me more analytical and aware of my own
mistakes in my writing style. Along with the three main essays we had to write, it just further

refined my writing style and writing process.

Speaking of revising, this is also something that helped me improve as a writer over all.

As I mentioned previously, the peer reviews, and peer feed back helped me be more analytical of

mistakes in my writing and in turn helped me conduct and write better essays and better

statements. With these revision skills I was able to go back to my research analysis essay and

revise it by myself one last time in an attempt to make it even better than its current final draft.

Based on instructor feedback I was able to change some mistakes that I made in my final draft of

my research analysis essay. First of all, I mistakenly placed some second person words like

“you” into my introduction and body paragraph, so I immediately changed those into something

along the lines of “the player” or “the people”. Second, Mr. Powers noticed that I had left out

some information in my introduction. I mentioned how some studies had a “bias” take on the

topic I was researching on, and Mr. Powers suggested I try to provide background as to why they

had a bias when publishing the information. He also advised me to replace the titles of the

articles in my body paragraphs with something else other than the title. When I was explaining

information about the topic in my body paragraphs, I had placed the title of the article I was

referencing along with their respective authors or researchers, but Mr. Powers recommended me

to attempt to remove the titles and replace them with something else since the titles of the articles

are already in my works cited page. This recommendation was the most challenging to me, the

reason being that I did not know what to replace the titles with. Since the essay had to be a

certain number of words, I had a bit of trouble thinking about what to replace them with. But

eventually, I was able to extend some of the paragraphs by just explaining in further detail

without the need of the titles.

 This was one of the most challenging aspects of my final revised essay mainly because I

did not know what to replace the change with. As explained earlier, the change was to remove

the titles of the articles I was referencing in my body paragraphs, mainly because I already had

the titles of the articles in my works cited. Removing the text from the paragraphs was an easy

task to perform but what was challenging for me was what to replace them with. As stated

before, I had to write the research analysis essay with a certain number of total words and if I did

not meet that word count, then I would get points deducted from the final draft. So, after going

back to the journals, websites, and articles I grabbed all of that information from, I was able to

organize some more information and stretch out information that I had already typed out.

This choice was one of the many decisions I made to communicate core concepts to the

three main essays. One of the decisions I made to convey concepts and information was that of in

text citations. In text citations are easy to do, can convey information quickly, yet clearly, and are

useful for evidence since in text citations grab and cite directly from an article while still giving

evidence to the authors of an article. But before writing, one must have a writing plan to plan out

their essay and writing. My writing plan was mainly planning as I typed. I am not really one to

plan out an essay beforehand and then type information from an article. I am more used to

planning as I type, seeing what works, seeing what doesn’t, organize as I type, and once I finish

typing a paragraph, I go back and review the paragraph to make sure there are no mistakes, or if

anything I wrote seems like is out of place or unorganized. There was one instance however in

which I did have to plan out an essay before hand and that was in the argumentative essay. This

was a little unfamiliar to me, so this was a good opportunity in order to learn how to pre plan an

essay and plan an argumentative essay too. This was not too hard even though I am not too
familiar with pre planning and I was able to learn something new while writing the

argumentative essay.

I think one of the most challenging aspects of this course was most definitely keeping up

with the three essay assignments we had. The three essay assignments, in it of themselves were

relatively easy to do and write since most, if not all of them, were just gathering information,

quoting, citing, writing, and repeat. But keeping up with the dates to turn them in was as pretty

tough challenge since we had to write many drafts and reflections that were a couple of dates

apart. Alongside keeping up with the due dates, doing the research for the annotated

bibliographies was also a pretty tough task. With many data bases in the large open digital world

of the internet, there were a lot of articles, research papers, and papers to get information from.

Deciding which papers to use though was the tricky part, since a lot of papers and articles were

not really what I was looking for and did not have the adequate information that I was expecting

them to have. It was a difficult task to search for around ten different articles concerning my

research topic and it took me a while to find ten different articles to write my annotated

bibliography needed for this course.

As for the easiest thing about this course, I believe it was writing all of those three main

essays needed for the course. Personally, I am a fan of writing since it gets my brain to think

about what I want to type about next, where to put certain sentences or paragraphs, and what

information is good enough for me to use. I have always enjoyed writing essays, especially now

since these essays had to be longer than any essay I have written before during my high school

years, and alongside the three main essays, the reflection essays we had to do were also very

easy for me to do. The reflection essays were done after we turned in the final draft of a main

essay, and these essays were particularly easy mainly because it was just reflecting on the writing
process while writing said essay. These reflection essays were fun and easy to do since they also

gave me a change to reflect on the choices I made during my writing process. Another easy yet

fun thing to do was take part in the peer feedback labs we had during the classes. I like reading

other people’s works and drafts after they type. It helps me get a view on their writing process,

their way of thinking, and the choices they make. During the labs we had to read a peers draft to

provide feedback on their work. This not only was useful for my peers and I, but also gave us a

chance to get to know each other a little bit better since we had to communicate a lot during

these peer review labs.

I feel this course has most definitely prepared me for future classes, assignments, and

work projects too. This course was one of my favorites this semester with many reasons as to

why. The classes were fun and entertaining, Mr. Powers was funny, approachable, and a good

explainer, and the work was easy and fun, but also challenging which made it pretty engaging for

me as a student who likes a small challenge. This course definitely did prepare me by introducing

me to many different topics, subjects, essay types, writing styles, and many more lessons taught

during lectures and outside of lectures as well. I will always remember this class fondly as one of

my favorite English classes I have taken at Texas A&M International University.