Cardenas

Jose G. Cardenas

Professor Gonzalez

ENGL 1302-680

9 October 2021

Final Reflective Essay

At the beginning of the semester, I thought English would be an easy subject, and an easy class

to pass, however I was dearly wrong. The class began quickly, and I was already stressed out the

first day because I saw that we already had an essay assigned. I automatically started to

overthink and started to look for other classes that I could replace this one with. Unfortunately,

there weren’t many classes that I could have switched over to, so I figured I would go ahead and

grind through the course and lessons to pass this class.

At the beginning, I didn’t think I was bad as a writer, however with the comments

received from my professor I realized that I had to get on the ball and try the best I could. What

hurt me the most was when covid initially hit and we all went for Spring Break vacation, because

at the time I was taking English 1301, and I was not able to receive the feedback on the essay

that I had done in class. My strengths as a writer were none, I don’t think I had any effective

strengths, however that was my weakness, I had no clue whether I was heading in the right

direction or not. I did have issues with grammar, thesis, finding articles, punctuation, incomplete

sentences, how to quote from articles, so on and so forth. This class aided me in the right

direction to overcome my weaknesses.

In the first essay we had assigned, I felt like I was reading Chinese because I had no idea

what I was doing, it felt as if my mind had a huge brain fart. However, I still felt confident on my
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first draft because I had gotten down the introduction and the explanation of my experiment. My

issues with the first draft were that my introduction was too long, and I had no idea what my

thesis statement was. In the second draft, I learned that I had to add a header with page numbers,

I edited the introduction and added quotes from articles, and I added another body paragraph

explaining the activities and food I ate during my experiment. My weaknesses for this draft were

that I did not correctly add page numbers, I did not indent at the beginning of each paragraph,

and again my thesis was not found. For my final draft of Essay 1 I added my last remaining body

paragraphs, changed the title, revised each paragraph, made sure all my pages were numbered

correctly, and made sure my essay was in correct MLA format. For the final revision, I cut out

all the excessive “fat” from my introduction, I learned what a thesis was, so I went back to add

that in, added in sentences, removed sentences, fixed my grammatical errors. Overall, I think my

Essay 1 still has room for improvement, but overall, much better than what it originally was.

I think the essay that I struggled with the most was the second, because I didn’t have

enough time to successfully understand my mistakes in essay 1, and we had to find articles. So,

with this essay prompt I found myself filled with stress and anxiety. The first draft for essay 2

was a mess, I felt like I was under so much pressure to clear my mind and focus on the

requirements of the essay. The introduction to the essay was all over the place, I was not making

sense, it was too long, and failed to introduce my thesis statement once again. I forgot to add

page numbers, the body paragraph did not correlate with the introduction, and did not correctly

quote the authors from the articles. I think my second draft was worse than the first, because I

had the page numbers wrong, I didn’t fix the mistakes that occurred in the first draft, and I added

excessive information to my introduction thus making it longer and irrelevant. I had a lot of work

to do to fix my mistakes in the second draft. For the final draft of essay 2, I did not feel proud in
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my work, because I rushed through the essay and made so many mistakes, the essay was not in

correct MLA formatting, grammatical errors everywhere, and once again I did not fix the page

numbers resulting in page numbers 11, 12, 13. For the final revision however, I edited and fixed

the introduction including a thesis statement, went back to every paragraph and fixed all my

grammatical errors, fixed incomplete sentences, fixed page numbers, cut out all the irrelevant

information that I provided and deleted the works cited that was not being used in my essay. I

still need improvement in this essay because I feel like I just went along and fast tracked through

the entire essay.

In my essay three I showed huge improvements in my drafts and in my final as well. This

essay prompt seemed easier because I was going to use the sources that I used in my second

essay. Yet, it was still challenging because I had to find better sources to accommodate my thesis

and help my essay flow easier. So, for the first draft of this essay I did not do much but only an

introduction, yet even the introduction itself was not good enough. Just like my previous essay, I

was all over the place in the introduction, I did not have a clear thesis statement, nor the three

main ideas. I knew that I needed major work, so I tried my best and only edited the introduction

for my second draft and made sure that it had a clear introduction. However, I still needed work

to fix on the second draft, because although it was better than the second draft, I was not fully

clear about the three main ideas and was putting information that should be in body paragraphs

to my introduction. So, I had set up an appointment with the writing center because I needed a lot

of work to do to finish the essay, because I only had an introduction and no body paragraphs.

With the help of the writing center I learned how to successfully build an essay and put it all

together. So, I changed the introduction, took out the information that should have been for my

body paragraphs and played it all based on the work that my tutor had assisted me with. For the
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final revision of the essay, I replaced trauma with stress, fixed my incomplete sentences, signal

phrasing, introduced the articles used followed by the authors, explained my articles more, and

fixed my grammatical errors. I made sure the revision for this essay was immaculate, this was the

essay I truly felt proud of because not only did I get a good grade, but my professor did not have

a lot of negative comments about my paper. The paper might need a bit of tinkering with, but I

feel like overall, I did a great job on showing my work as a writer.

I feel like I have changed a lot through this class because I learned how to write a better

paper for any upcoming essay that I have from other classes. I learned a lot from this class,

coming back to school without any practice hurt me in many ways because I felt like I was not

able to process things to write. At first this course was challenging because of all the work

assigned, the deadlines were back-to-back, trying to learn on my own, correcting my paper

without a professor physically present, etc. All these factors made the course difficult, especially

not having that one-on-one contact with a professor or tutor, because I had to make corrections,

learn and communicate through a screen in my room alone. I feel like improvement can be seen

effectively through my three essays, showing my performance and skills articulated in a whole

different way. All of my stress and anxiety finally came to a mere end because all the weight of

this course completely fell off my shoulders. I can say that this course helped me learn many

different things about writing that I had no idea about like quoting authors, how to cite the

quotations adding the page number at the end of the quote, seeing what my grammatical errors

were, and how a year of no school can poorly affect my writing skills. I still need a lot of work as

a writer, in places such as grammar, punctuation, and thesis. I feel like these are three topics that

are still affecting me, however, whenever I am going to complete an essay for another course, I

will come back to my notes and create a correct MLA format essay. I want to thank my professor
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for this class because without his help from the countless emails I sent, I would not have been

able to complete the class.