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Francisco Campos

Professor Beadle

English 115

9 May 2019

Reflection of the Semester:

This semester I took English 115 with Professor Beadle and to be honest I did not expect

to get much out of the class. My expectations were that this English class would be like every

other English class I had taken previous to this one. Every other English I had taken in English

did not actually help me develop my writing skills as much as English 115 did. The teachers I

had before would not actually give me much feedback on my essays, they pretty much would

just give me a grade for the essay and that would be that. That changed in this class because we

Professor Beadle would give great feedback on all of our essays and they would really help

develop my writing skills. If it were not for Professor Beadle’s English class, I do not think I

would have improved on many aspects of my writing such as doing an essay outline, writing a

clear thesis, relating my body paragraphs to the thesis, writing counterarguments, and so much

more. All of my improvement was seen as we went from Project Space, to Project Text, and

Project Media.

My writing skills were very poor coming into this class and that was reflected in Project

space because it was the first essay that we wrote in class and it was the essay in which I

received my lowest score. It was also the essay in which I received the most comments from the

professor. Looking at this essay I can see that my thesis was very unclear and I did not do a good

job at writing and introduction that would capture the attention of a reader. Making my

introduction too vague resulted in my body paragraphs not correlating much to the point that my
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thesis was trying to make. Something else that I am glad that improved on was providing

evidence in my essays because in the essay for Project Space there are a lot of comments that are

asking me where the evidence was at. It is very easy to see that I was not very good at analyzing

the readings and I was trying to answer the prompts without really having an idea of what I was

going to write. I had an answer in mind for the prompts, but I was not good when it came to

developing my thoughts into an essay. I also did not know how to format the citations because

now that I look at my citations page I see that the way in which I did it was very incorrect.

Now, moving on to Project Text I can see where I improved from the first essay, but I can

also see the mistakes that I was still making when it came to writing a well developed essay. I

can see that I improved on the essay for Project Text because I got a higher score on this essay

than I had gotten on the essay for Project Space. I see that one of the mistakes I was still making

was not providing enough details in my thesis, resulting in it still being too general. Something

else I noticed that I was still messing up on was providing specific evidence. I would use the

evidence, but I would not elaborate on it at all, I would just provide the quote. Another mistake

that I would do every now and then is that I would forget to include a citation after a quote so it

was not clear what part of the essay was coming from the source and what was not. The final

mistake that I made on the second essay was that I did not correctly format my sources in the

works cited page. Although I did commit some mistakes on this essay, I also improved in my

writing. Even though my thesis was still sort of off par with the requirements, it was still better

than the first thesis I had written in this class. It was actually much clearer and the ideas were

there. My body paragraphs also related to the thesis in this essay thanks to the essay outline, it

really did help. This essay was also one of the first essays in which I had written a

counterargument and at first I was kind of nervous because I did not know what to expect out of
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it, but Professor Beadle did a good job of guiding us through a counterargument and I did okay.

It was not until the following essay where I felt really comfortable writing a counterargument

and refuting it.

On to the final essay that we wrote for this class, which was for Project Media, my

improvement shows because it was the essay in which I got my highest score. I wrote my best

thesis in the essay, it was very clear and it included all of the requirements that a thesis needs in

order to write a good essay. I also did a good job on my citations page because I finally got it

right and wrote it in the proper format. My evidence was also all there in my essay, I cited

everything whenever I used a quote from one of my sources. Now that I have gotten to the final

essay I am glad my writing skills got to where they are, but, of course, there is always room for

improvement. Something that I improved on, which I think cannot be noticed through the essay,

was writing an essay outline. I had never before written an essay outline because I thought that it

would just take up more time than was necessary, but I decided to take it serious when writing an

essay outline and it vastly improved my writing skills. An essay outline really helps you put your

ideas in order and it allows you to see what will work in your essay and what you should leave

out. It also helped me stay on topic because in previous essays I would run out of things to say

and I would go off topic just to I could fill in space needed. Peer review also helped me improve

my writing skills, I used to think that it was not very beneficial to do peer review because people

would be writing about different things, but now I realized that it is good seeing the perspective

of others because it allows me to make correction to my essay that I may have not corrected if it

were not for peer review.

Overall, English 115 was not like every other English class that I have had before. I was

just in this class because it is a requirement for my major, but now that I look back on it, I am
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glad that I was in this class. My writing feels much better and my grammar is also better than it

was before. I also got better at analyzing everything that was presented to us, which is something

that I will really need in the career that I am pursuing. I will also need the skill of thinking about

counterarguments and refuting them, and that is a skill that I really got better at as the semester

went on. Each essay that I wrote was a reflection of the improvement I was making over time.

This class has many benefits and I am glad that they all result in leaving someone a better writer

than they were before they were in the class.