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Regina Nishiyama

Dr. Loren Higbee

English 1301

2 December 2021

An Overall Review of My Time in English 1301

Throughout the course of Dr. Higbee's class, I learned concepts ranging from genre

analysis, writing styles, making a proper claim, fallacies, rhetorical devices, rhetorical analysis,

etc. All these different assignments and essays that I had to do have broadened my knowledge

and helped me become a better writer overall. In this final reflection essay, I will go through my

thought process in my final revisions, the different things I learned from each of my assignments,

and my overall experience in this course.

In my first attempt at our first essay (Genre Analysis), I missed the mark by a few feet. I

was very confident with my genre and audience, but I did not realize I had misunderstood the

objective of the essay; instead of analyzing how the audience and the genre interacted with each

other, I rhetorically analyzed Disney's advertisements and graded how well they did at showing

these advertisements in the actual parks. I guess I jumped the gun a little and skipped all the way

to essay three when writing this one. Because I got a second chance to rewrite this essay for my

portfolio, I kept in mind Dr. Higbee's comments, focused on one advertisement alone, and picked

a more specific audience. This essay went through the most changes; I changed my whole thesis

in the intro but kept the same topic. Instead of writing how Disney's advertisements fall flat in

the actual parks, I wrote how their super bowl commercials have been able to generate them

money because the idea of a perfect vacation hypnotizes their fans. I wrote three different

paragraphs on how this advertisement is interacted with and the overall outcome of these
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interactions. Rhetorically I made these changes in hopes to fall on target this time, not because of

the change in audience.

Based on the feedback I got from my peers and the writing center, I did not make any

changes to my first essay. During peer review, only one of my group mates was able to review

my report and did not provide much criticism. All of her comments were very positive, so I did

not think I needed to change anything. Based on the writing center's critiques, I did not get any

feedback on whether or not my essay was within the scope of the assignment prompt. All of the

advice I got from them was to fix my grammatical errors and some sentence structure changes.

Overall, because I did not get a lot of critique for this essay, I did not know I missed the mark,

but after Dr. Higbee's comments, I was able to make it better for my portfolio.

During the time that I was writing this essay, weeks one through three, we did multiple

assignments that helped us during this writing process and proved helpful throughout the entire

class. For example, our assignment "Shitty first drafts," in which we read a story by Annie

Lamott about just letting all the words leave your head no matter if they make a good story or not

(Lamott). This assignment helped me realize that I should not put so much pressure on myself to

do everything perfectly on the first try because I can always go back and make improvements.

This is one of the assignments that I can use in other classes and not just English. I think back to

Lamott's words and remind myself that not everything comes out perfect on the first try, and I

can always just go back to it later.

Sentence fragments, essential and non-essential information, and rhetorical situations are

also among some of the things we went over during these first three weeks. These assignments

helped refresh my mind on the basics of an English class since it had been a while since I had not

done any real writing work in a while. The sentence fragment assignment helped me realize that
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many of my thoughts were incomplete, and the assignment helped me find ways to fix those

sentences (Lunsford, 740). The essential and non-essential assignment opened my eyes to how

much information I included just to reach the word count that did not actually add anything

meaningful to my work (Lunsford, 754 and OWL Proofreading). I was able to catch my mistakes

because of these two assignments and make my writing stronger. The rhetorical situation

assignment helped me better understand what rhetoric was. For the first essay, in particular, it

helped me figure out the rhetorical situation of the genre analysis essay. For example, I was able

to understand that my audience was my peers and professor, while the issue was figuring out

how and why participants interact with a particular genre. The set of constraints in this essay

included things like time, word count, and lack of experience or ability to write about the genre.

Essay two, (Genre compare and contrast), proved to be easier than essay one. Overall, in

this essay, I got a better grade and a better comment from my professor. In this essay, I did not

change my entire article as I did in essay one, and I mainly added information to provide more

background and add to the comparison aspect of the essay. From professor Higbee's comment

about expanding on the issue of affordability due to demographics, I added a paragraph

explaining more on the topic and how and why the other schools cannot cater as well to

minorities the way TAMIU does. Rhetorically I added this paragraph in hopes of explaining

myself better; I understood what I was trying to say without the added paragraph, because I

researched it and had already grasped the concept, but because my readers are not going to look

at these websites after reading my essay, I wanted to give them some more information. This

essay was more difficult to fix for my portfolio because I thought I did a decent job and did not

see many parts where I needed to adjust it to better fit my portfolio.

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Based on peer review and writing center comments, I did not change much. My peers,

like before, did not give many critiques; again, only one of my peers was able to provide

feedback, and all of it was positive. On the other hand, my writing center visit went a little bit

better than last time. My tutor reminded me to reiterate that I was talking about college websites

because readers could get lost and forget what exactly my genre was. In my final revision of the

essay, I made sure to look out for how many times I mentioned that I was analyzing a website

page, and if it seemed like I was lacking that word in some of my paragraphs, I would find ways

to integrate it.

During this writing process, the assignment that proved to be the most beneficial was the

reflective activity at the bottom of page 682 in the Lunsford book (Lunsford, 682). This was not

only a very fun activity, but it helped me better understand who I was as a writer because I was

able to reflect on my work. I was able to see how writing style and personal styles may not

always be similar and that even though my writing style does not reflect my unique style, it did

not mean my writing was not good. This assignment was also very refreshing because I wrote

about Harry Styles, someone I find exciting, and had no trouble writing almost a whole page on

the topic.

The Lunsford questions on chapters 8 and 9 also proved to be very helpful during this

essay (Lunsford, 122). The assignment was about reading defensively and showed me that even

though something may look sophisticated and factual, I always need to make sure I fact-check

what the author may be saying just in case they are using some kind of fallacy to trick me into

agreeing with them. This was useful in essay two because whenever I was presented with

information from the three different websites, I would make sure to see if the school was just

adding it to make their school look good or they were actually providing accurate statistics. For
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example, when looking at TAMU's website, they claim to be one of the top affordable schools,

but when I went to fact-check it, their affordability was nothing compared to that of TAMIU.

Finally, the third essay (Rhetorical analysis), seemed to be the most simple of them all;

even though this essay was the longest and took more research than the other two, the objective

was simple: look at the devices the author used and discuss whether or not their choices

benefited their article. Because I chose an article that was interesting to me, reading through and

finding the different rhetorical choices the author made was no chore. And because the debate of

whether the devices were useful was mainly based on opinion, this essay was not that difficult.

My professor's one critique that helped me edit this essay the most was that some of the devices I

talked about had multiple usages. For example, in my writing, I spoke about how Daniels was

able to use outside researchers to add credibility to her essay through ethos. Still, I did not

acknowledge the fact that credible sources also appeal to logos. So, I went back and added a

couple of sentences to each paragraph about how the rhetorical choices Daniel made could be

either two or sometimes three-dimensional to strengthen and add a little more depth to my essay.

The rhetorical aspect of adding these few mentions of logos was to show readers that I

understood the different rhetorical choices Daniels made, and show I knew more than just ethos

and pathos.

During these last few weeks of class, where we worked on essay three, the assignment

that helped me the most was "Fallacies of Argument," (A. Lunsford). When paired with the

reading defensively mentioned above, this assignment is beneficial and taught me not to trust

everything I read. Because we had to pick one article out of an ocean full of options, it became

helpful to eliminate some out of my stack when I would look for pieces that were using fallacies

as ways to prove their research. It also came in useful because I now had more rhetorical choices
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to pick from to look for in my article; I only knew a handful of rhetorical devices which would

not have allowed me to reach the word count of the essay, but once I learned about the different

kinds of fallacies, I was able to use that when rhetorically analyzing the article I chose.

Moving into my final portfolio, I decided to go with a very simple layout to put more

emphasis on my actual writing; it is like a museum. An artist would not want the existing

architecture of the building to outshine the paintings that are being put on display. I still added

some small inventive pieces like making the comments I got from my peers and professor look

like ratings to reflect a bit of my creativity. My reflection essay takes the first spot right after the

home page so as to guide any viewers through my thought process and my overall time in this

class. Then I go on to display all three of my essays, including some notes from my professor,

peers, and writing center. After the third essay, I display all my work in chronological order to

show viewers where I started and how I ended the class. The pages are in groups of threes,

because on average, that is how long it took us to work on each essay, so if visitors wanted to

look at all the work I did during my first essay, they would find it all in one tab from weeks one

through three.

Overall, I really enjoyed this class because I surprised myself with my work and because

my professor was very good at keeping us engaged and helping us as much as he could along the

way. Based on the other classes I took this semester, this class was challenging, but the professor

did not leave us to drown in our own assignments and was willing to answer any questions we

had. And although there was a lot of work to be done, none of it was extremely hard. It was a

good brain exercise that was very doable and, in the end, very rewarding. I enjoyed the fact that

the assignments and essays we did throughout this semester are not one-dimensional; the skills

we gained from these assignments can be repurposed towards other classes, which means this
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class was not just about learning English; it was about becoming a better communicator.

Hopefully, viewers can see just how hard I worked during this semester and enjoy reading some

of the work I enjoyed writing.