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Alexandra Meister

Professor Watson

English 1001

March 8, 2019

Retrospective Essay

Over the course of what seems like just a few weeks, I have learned various key components to

improve my writing. I started out with limited knowledge about what it takes to write a college level

essay. In my ePortfolio are a few pieces of work that I have written this semester for English 1001. The

first piece is my summary assignment which I believe was a great starting out piece of work. The next

essay in my ePortfolio is the Rhetorical analysis I wrote, about food portions. My latest piece of work

was my Exploratory essay that focused on the FDA regulating the vitamin industry. It was important for

me to set up this portfolio of my writing pieces in the first half of this semester, so I can see how well my

skills are developing and if there are any components of my writing that need work. Seeing the work,

you’ve put together in chronological order can easily show where you may be lacking because most

people tend to make the same mistakes until they learn otherwise.

The paper I Chose to improve and proclaim as my best yet for this class was my Exploratory

Essay. The reason I chose this paper is because it really stretched my thinking and got me out of my

comfort zone. Having to write a 6-8-page essay wasn’t easy being that the longest essay I’ve wrote was

probably 3 pages maximum. In the beginning, it was hard to find a lot of reputable sources for my piece

but what I realized is that there were few websites with this information but those that did had

immense amounts of information on the subject. Another thing I stumbled on while writing this essay
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was the length, nut to have length your paper must have a lot of key sources so once I figured those out,

including the photo, it helped a lot.

Coming into this class my main goal is to become a better writer so that I can be confident in my

writing, no matter who I am writing for. A couple things to help get me toward this goal are improving

knowledge about citing information and learning how to create a well- structured essay no matter the

length or content. I think that these are things that have improved but a large amount since I have

started English 1001, but they could still use more work. These are why my goals for the future are still

the same one but also to learn how to adapt to different writing styles and techniques. I hope that going

forward I can keep improving my writing more and more with each assignment.