Peenitbut

Sheri Peenitbut
Prof. Jon Beadle
English 113B
11 May 2016
Reflection
Throughout this semester, the work that was assigned are consists of writing an essay.
There were two projects that required an essay after doing the research for the topic of the
project. Both of my essays are complete and have been graded with the rubric attached to it.
When I got back my essays, the professor has wrote some comments next to my mistakes letting
me know what went wrong. From the comments and the score that were given, I did better on my
second essay than the first essay. An improvement was made throughout the essays because of
the help from the LRC and the comments that were written on my previous essays to better my
understandings and writing for my next essays.
Project space was the first assignment that required our class to write a four to five page
essay about our cultural space. In this essay I wrote about having two cultures, which was the
American culture and the Thai culture. I thought this essay would be a quick and easy one
because I like to write about my interests and to share my cultural side to others who are not
familiar with it. When I got back my essay, the results didnt turn out to be how I pictured it. The
essay wasnt that bad but I needed to provide a deeper explanation of how these things have
influenced your identity as you yourself see it. This was a comment from the professor saying
that I need to explain myself better from my own perspective. In the second paragraph of this
essay, I described how I act differently between the two cultures. When I was talking about the
American culture, I said, When I am in the American culture I wouldnt say anything and

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would only nod my head. Right after, I talked about how I act in the Thai culture saying that,
As for the Thai culture, when I meet someone who is also Thai I would feel more comfortable
while talking to them. It feels like I dont have to make an effort to make a conversation.
Whenever Im in the Thai culture, I feel more like myself and dont need to force myself into a
different lifestyle. The Thai culture is what mainly shapes my identity. I come to realize now
that in this statement I only talked about my personality between the two cultures. The comment
that the professor wrote aside from this paragraph was, What is the connection between these
behaviors and how you see yourself? Meaning that, aside from how I act in the cultures, what
do I think of myself when I approach them. Some other errors was creating a quote sandwich and
citing the quotes. In the third paragraph of my essay I just started out with the quote. I was
supposed to introduce the quote and then explain it further in the next sentence. For this essay,
the big mistakes were explain the quotes properly and explaining how these cultures influence
me as myself see it.
Project text was the second project that also required an essay. The class was assigned to
read a book called Every Day by David Levithan. For this essay, everyone in the class had to
select an issue that was given by the professor. The issues can involve a social, political,
psychological, or financial issue, a cultural attitude, or a conflict in the book. The issue that I
chose was nature versus nurture. Nature meaning biology and nurture meaning something that is
socially learned. While writing this essay I thought that I wouldnt do so well because I dont
really like writing these types of essays. This topic isnt something that I am familiar with which
means that I would have to do further research. It is different from the first essay because I get to
write about myself, which is more comfortable for me. When I got my graded essay, I was
surprised because I got a better grade than the first essay. With the project text essay I have

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improved on the thesis, support, organization, and the mechanics of the essay. But I still need to
remember cite the quotes. A big problem that I have trouble with while writing an essay is to
elaborate more on my argument. An example from this essay would be when I gave a quote and
saying, This quote shows that without the influences we experience at birth, while we grow up,
we will be able to develop our own ideas. I realize now that this sentence doesnt really explain
the quote that I type down. The question that was given for this was, How does this idea relate
to your argument about Every Day? This means that I would have to explain deeper into the
quote and relate it back to my argument. Another example would be when I said, In Rhiannons
and As situation, it relates to the quote from the article by not engaging in the ideas of how
society pictures life. After this sentence I shouldve gave specific examples from the book as
evidence to support my argument, but I didnt. In order to make this essay sound more effective
was to clarify and support my argument in a better way.
This semester was a tough one. But throughout the course I have improved so much on
my writing. Before, I always had trouble with repetition and understanding the prompt and
assignments. After revising and going to the LRC, this course has motivated me to actually
understand what I am supposed to do. Knowing how much the essays and going to the LRC is
worth towards my grades, I would do my best to fix the mistakes that Ive done to make every
work an improvement. This course has made me opened minded to how much an assignment is
worth improving on. After this course I feel that I can now write an essay without worrying
about whether or not it is good or bad. Because of the preparation and revising for the essay, it
can make me confident that this essay will become a great work no matter how hard it was to
accomplish it. Like what my professor said, If you can write about a rock, you can write about
anything.