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Jose Luis Arredondo

Instructor. McCann

English 1302 – 201

9 February 2024

Stepping Forward

Writing for English 1301 was hard. Like extremely difficult, even to the point where I

had to pull multiple all-nighters just to get my essays done. While the difficultly for English 1301

mainly strained from my inability to manage time, it still helped me improve my writing skills by

a large margin, and now in English 1302, I’ve put those skills to use in order to write my

research essay. For this research essay we were instructed to choose a topic of our liking to

research about, along with 2 or more articles to help prove my points. When creating this

research essay, I felt it was very similar to doing something for the science fair. We get an

interesting topic, we research it, and we make some complete BS assumption about what we

expect to happen. Before starting my research essay, I really thought it would be simple and fun,

that is until I realized I have to not only write 1200 words about my experiment, but that I was

also at the mercy of my own experiment.

When it comes to my actual experiment, I feel it was the most difficult part of this

research paper. For my experiment I chose to research the correlation between physical activity

and whether or not it would make going up flights of stairs easier. The exercise part was the

hardest part of it all since I hadn’t exercised in like a couple of weeks beforehand, so getting

back into the groove of working out was torture. Luckily though, I didn’t need to create some

crazy custom workout routine for this essay since all the workout routines used in the essay are

real routines that I use myself. Other than that, another difficult part was finding the time and
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place to actually conduct the experiment. When it came to the workouts I performed them at

home, and specifically the running part I did at the park near my house. Before creating this

essay, I already had the TAMIU library in mind since its stairs were already traumatizing enough.

Actually, going to the TAMIU library was another thing entirely since I had to find the time out

of my busy school schedule to conduct the experiment, so as a result, I needed to go there right

after school.

Before even conducting the experiment, I had quickly drafted out my essay. Most of the

stuff in my essay draft obviously didn’t make any sense, but that’s mainly because it was made

before the experiment. Some of the stuff in the draft was used as somewhat of an outline for what

I wanted to put once I had finished the experiment. There was also some stuff in there that was

just filler. Most of the filler stuff was just stupid random stuff I thought would be funny to put in,

especially since I fully expected my professor to read my draft. Once I had actually finished the

essay, I obviously removed all of the filler that was in there. Surprisingly though, I didn’t remove

all the filler because it was obviously made up and dumb, but because I genuinely had a logical

and thought-out reason for it, as I felt that just having quotes in my essay got really repetitive and

also took away attention from the really important parts of my research. So surprisingly, all that

stupid stuff I had put in as a joke actually served a good purpose in the end. Maybe that’s

something I’ll try for future essays or when writing in other classes. Just write something long

and stupid and see what sticks in the end. Sadly though, most of the stupid and funny stuff will

probably be cut out.

So after writing my essay, I obviously needed someone else to review it. In class we were

specifically instructed to do this by our professor, and so we had to find partners and stuff to pair

up with for peer review. Most of the feedback I had gotten from peer reviewing was honestly not
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that helpful. The feedback I had received varied from citations to repetition and stuff. However,

most of that feedback was already stuff I was already thinking about when it came to my essay.

So, while peer reviewing didn’t necessarily provide me with anything unknown to me at the

time, it did help to validate some of the criticisms I had towards my own essay. I didn’t really

learn anything new about my writing strengths and weaknesses, though, which kind of sucked.

However, maybe that’s actually a good thing.

Writing this essay was definitely a learning experience. While I can’t go on a whole

tangent about the amazing things I’ve learned in English 1302, I can say that I at least learned

something when writing my research essay. For one, the biggest thing I’ve learned from this

essay is obviously how to write a research essay. I’ve never written a research essay before, so it

was semi-difficult figuring out the whole thing. Though, that was for the beginning stages of my

essay, as by the time I was done with my introduction I already had writing a research essay

down. With that being said, I didn’t really learn a whole lot from this essay as I’d like. While the

articles I had chosen for this essay were meant to help me learn more about my own topic, most

of the information in them was stuff that I had actually known beforehand. Even though I wasn’t

able to learn what the experimental participation mean, or whatever, even meant, (This thing → n

= 12; male/female = 3/9, age = 20.0 } 1.8 years; body mass index = 21.9 } 5.0 kg/m2; mean

} SD) I still got the gist of what was in the articles at least. Hopefully, though, in the future, I’ll

eventually get the chance to decipher the hieroglyphics that is the experimental participation

mean in an experiment.