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Jenna Arthur

Professor Hugetz

ENGL 1301-05

02 December 2020

Reflective Essay

The report essay taught me a great amount about effective communication and how to

assess my own work. This essay made my writing errors and patterns much more obvious to me

because I was making the same mistakes I had before in my review essay. I was still struggling

in following instructions and staying on topic. I think this essay led to many improvements in my

writing, with the help of feedback from peers as well as my instructor.

In writing my report essay, I especially struggled writing the cards. It took a lot of re-

evaluating to finally collect clear thoughts on my topic. I misinterpreted the cards somehow and

ended up greatly off topic. This effected my writing of the report essay because it made my topic

unclear, leading to many corrections on my Turnitin submission. Communicating with my

teacher was important at this point, leading me to realize that my topic was filled with errors. I

had to back track and refocus my topic on health science, rather than Covid-19. This

communication with my instructor was very helpful in improving my essay, as I was able to get

further feedback about what exactly was wrong. Another error I consistently made in writing this

essay was in my parenthetical citations as well as my works cited. My works cited were

corrected by a tutor to this format: “(Jahan 228-229),” though these corrections made did not

follow my instructor's guidelines. I learned from this that utilization of my instructors provided

information was very important in successfully avoiding plagiarism. My errors in my works cited

could also have been avoided this way. I was able to fix these in a later essay when I finally
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reached out to my instructor and asked her what I was doing wrong. Lastly, in this essay, as well

as the previous essay, I did not introduce my quotes correctly with a colon. I was unaware that

this was a requirement, so as I saw this correction appear repeatedly from my instructor, I took

the hint and resolved this error.

After facing seeing these errors in my preliminary work and drafts, I was able to fix them

much more effectively in the work to come. The corrections provided by my peers and instructor

were very helpful in improving my work, as they elaborated and explained the mistakes I

unknowingly made. After receiving feedback on my cards, I was able to organize my paper

correctly and write on topic much better. I re-evaluated my cards and made many changes in

order to outline what I was supposed to be writing about, which helped the writing of my full

paragraphs substantially. Though I had issues in citations still, I was able to improve on them in

later assignments because my errors were more evident to me. In my evaluation of my incorrect

work, I was able to improve my report. After hearing my teacher explain on multiple occasions

that this essay was not an argument, it finally clicked to me that I should avoid personal bias and

stay neutral in my information.

My report essay is a fitting example of not only improvement, but a demonstration of

things I still needed to work on. Communication with my instructor and my peers was extremely

helpful in doing this because it helped me to utilize my resources and see the writing corrections

that I was unable to before.