Cristales 1

Kimberly Cristales

Engl 115

Ditch, Corri

December 7, 2020

Reflection Essay

Over the months of being in this course, we have learned several tips and strategies on

how to properly format our essay professionally. For example, how to formally organize our

essay in MLA format, how to properly connect our thesis with the prompt and being directly

specific, adding in evidence to prove our main idea, and lastly for our body paragraphs to relate

with the prompt as well. When I received back my written essays and looked at the comments

from my professor, it revealed how I needed more improvement and adjustments. This includes

being more in detail in my thesis, connecting all my paragraphs to the prompt, professionally

editing my work cited page, and how to fix my in-text quotations in MLA format. After all the

revision and editing I effortlessly did for these essays, I realized that my work has greatly

advanced in comparison to the previous essays I’ve done in the past.

One essay that I had to make some adjustments to was the Project Space Essay. The

prompt for this essay was overall based on reading these three articles from the “Pursuit of

Happiness” novel. When I received my essay back, I was required to work on detailing my thesis

more, and fixing all my paragraphs in linking with my main idea, and lastly including a work

cited page. Starting off with my draft thesis I merely stated that few of the articles required a

minimum of the three rhetorical devices and didn’t quite explain which one of the articles had

the best argument. Once I revised, I then stated, “Out of the three articles, the one that secures a

greater persuasive argument would be “How Happy Are You and Why?” by Sonja Lyubomirsk
 Cristales 2

because the author included much pathos and logos that affected the minds of her audience into

perspective whether they are really satisfied enough in their lives or not.” In comparison to the

graded essay, you can clearly see how my thesis changed up more specifically as my professor

requested. For my body paragraphs, I clearly saw that I really needed to connect to my thesis at

the end of each in-text quote where the quotes identified the rhetorical devices that were used.

Lastly for my work cited page, I needed to then cite all three articles since I used them as my

evidence in my essay. These were my mistakes and you can clearly see all the highlighted

sentences showing how I revised every error I did.

Another essay I revised and edited was my Project Text Essay. The prompt for this essay

connects to several researches and a novel from John Lewis. After I looked back at my essay and

read the comments from my professor, it made sense why I received a low score on it. What I did

wrong was my thesis was obviously unclear from what the prompt was asking. It seems that I

was way off topic and never answered the question. I rewrote my entire thesis and answered the

prompt specifically stating what were ways that John Lewis’s transformed his suffering that

connected to his activism. You can see from where I highlighted in the first paragraph. Another

error I revised was the in-text citations at the end of each quote and rather not analyze what each

quote meant but again connecting to my thesis. I changed up these errors by correctly adding the

authors last name and page and stating how each quote led to John’s Lewis activism. The last

tiny error I made in this essay was fixing up the cited-page.

In comparison to both graded and revisoned essays from the Project Text and Space, you

can see the differences I made showing how I improved overall from the highlighted sentences.

With the help of my professor’s comments I know now what to improve and look back for my

future essays.