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Regina Nishiyama

Dr. William Nolen

English 1302

1 May 2022

A Look Back

“Reflection: Looking back so that the view looking forward is even clearer” (unknown).

It is only by reflecting on the things we have done that we are better able to understand what we

should do later in the future. By reflecting on the things, I learned in English 1301 I was better

able to navigate through English 1302; having that background knowledge from the first course

was my foundation for my writing during this second semester. Along with the background

knowledge I had gained last semester, this course taught me a lot about the research area of

writing and how to connect previously done research to help strengthen my own research

articles. The following is a small synopsis of my time in English 1302 revising my three essay,

the rhetorical decisions I made within my portfolio, the different elements that helped me along

the way, and what particular topics I will take with me after this course.

During my first semester of English 1301, I was introduced to the college writing level,

and the higher standard of thinking and communicating that came with it. I had never been asked

to write a reflection piece alongside my main piece, but I found that in doing so I was better able

to connect with my work. For example, our first essay in English 1301 (Genre Analysis),

required us to analyze a written genre and how it was used within a community, along with this

we were given a set of reflection questions to write a separate essay about our writing process.

This reflection essay required us to think back to the homework assignments we were given

before the essay and think about how they were preparing us to better understand the topic of our
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essay. We also had to make connections to the pieces of literature we were required to read and

how they were able to strengthen us as writers and students. This helped me realize that college

writing is much more than just getting an essay done, it is about being able to understand the

multiple levels there are to drafting, editing, and submitting a paper.

Having gained this newfound foundation of writing from English 1301, prepared me for

English 1302. I was already used to connecting my essays to the things we were learning in class

and finding ways for these essays to be relevant outside of the course, so writing the reflection

essays for English 1302 was not something unfamiliar. The only real trouble I faced was from

the professor's side. In my first English course, our professor liked for us to write reflections as if

they were journal entries and we were not required to go into specifics and citing the assignment

and classes I was referring to in my reflection, but in English 1302, my professor required a more

detailed reflection that included the names of the assignments and chapters I discussed in my

reflection. Having been used to the vague and undetailed reflections from English 1301, when I

turned in what would have been a 100 for English 1301, resulted in a 70. At first, I was shocked,

because I was unaware of the requirements, but after seeing that all I lacked was detail, it made

me realize that every good writer needs to be as detailed as possible to allow for their audience to

better understand the topic at hand. Afterwards, I was better prepared for the second reflective

essay; I included multiple citations to homework assignments, chapters from the book, and peer-

review comments that allowed for me to go from a 70 to a 95. This was a major steppingstone

for my identity as a writer, because it made me realize how in order to be a decent writer, I need

to be able to inform my readers through details, citations, and evidence.

Going back to the aforementioned about reflection, this is the main thing I have taken

from English 1301 that I have applied to my other courses. After being introduced to reflecting

after each major assignment, I have realized it is an essential tool to understanding what you are
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learning. For example, after I reflected on how my essay relating to communities interacting with

written forms of genre, I was better able to understand how and why good rhetoric is important.

If you are trying to write a bilingual menu for a Mexican American restaurant, it is important for

the designer to make thoughtful choices on the rhetoric of the menu. Is your audience mainly

Hispanic or American? Is the main language of the menu going to be Spanish or English? Are

you going to include descriptions of the dishes in both languages or just one? All these points

would have only come to mind after reflecting on the topic of the essay and what I wrote. Now I

use this strategy on all my courses, for example, when taking my exams for Anatomy and

Physiology II, I was able to reflect on what I learned in Anatomy and Physiology I, to help me

better understand the content. In Anatomy I, we learned how the vocabulary terms of the course

were largely based on prefixes and suffixes. After having learned what each prefix suffix, and

root word meant, I could understand what the name of a disease entailed without having to look

up the actual definition. When taking exams for Anatomy II, I would reflect on what I had

learned from Anatomy I whenever I had doubts about what the question was asking. Learning

the value of reflection has been an eye-opening experience that allows me to succeed better

throughout my college career.

Another valuable tool I have gained from my English courses, is the importance of detail

and background information to strengthen your claim. In English 1302, the main two comments I

received from my professor was that I lacked detailed evidence, and background information

prior to stating my thesis. Specifically, Dr Nolen stated that “the more detailed evidence you

offer, the more reference points your reader will have. Remember that you are communicating

your argument to a reader who has only your description to go by” (Essay 1: The Personal

Experiment and the Research Essay) along with “background should be specific and detailed in

such a way as to create a context for the conversation the essay will present” (Essay 2: Research
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Analysis). These types of comments were recurring throughout my first two essays and reflective

essays; using the reflection strategy I learned from English 1301, I thought back to these

comments my professor left me and used them as guides while writing my third essay, my final

reflection essay, and editing the final draft of each essay we wrote throughout the course.

Realizing how detail allows for readers to better understand the topic of my essay, in turn helps

strengthen my argument allowed for me to grow my writing identity. Instead of being a writer

who is hard to understand and provides weak evidence to their arguments, I chose to take the

critique from my professor and work on my weaknesses to become a stronger writer. I was then

able to take that critique and apply it to my other courses. For example, I was required to

construct a PSA along with an informative PowerPoint about the topic of my PSA. I remembered

how Dr. Nolen had said that my audience can only base their knowledge off the information I

present, so in order to convey the urgency of my PSA, I added detailed evidence from multiple

peer-reviewed sources to my presentation and included a lot of background information to help

my audience better understand the topic. Taking the comments Dr. Nolen gave me throughout

my writing process has allowed me to strengthen my writing identity and given me more

resources to be a better student overall.

Moving on to the final project, I chose to make the look of my website sweet and simple

so as to make my work stand out. It is like a museum, you want a building that is plain and

simple where you are better able to showcase the artwork, without having anything to distract the

viewers from the main purpose of the museum. I wanted viewers to be more intrigued by the

contents of my work rather than the look of my webpage. Another structural component of my

website is that the work is displayed in chronological order. To better demonstrate how I have

been able to mature as a writer and learn from my past projects, I thought it would be best to

showcase how I started the semester to how I ended it. Not only are the essays displayed
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chronologically, but so is the work and the comments I got from my peers and professors to

better demonstrate how my time during English 1302 went. The look and organization of my

website are the two main rhetorical choices I thought would best reflect my overall growth as a

writer. The design of the website seemed to be the least complicated aspect of the entire project;

although the look of the website is just as important as the contents, making the decision of how

it was going to look seemed pretty clear from the start.

The real work came in when I had to go back to each of my papers and find ways to

improve them sufficiently for this portfolio. Revising each paper was the most complicated

aspect of the project; this part required me to go back to each week of the course and look at

what we had learned in order to decide what was the best way to clean up my essays. Essay 1

(Essay 1: The Personal Experiment and the Research Essay) seemed to be the most difficult

seeing as it was done at the very beginning of the course and the topic of the paper had already

been pushed to the far corners of my mind. I had to go back and look at the assignments we had

worked on during those weeks, re-read the essay guidelines, and look at all the comments left

from my professor and my peers. The one thing that helped me the most during this revision was

chapter 14 of Lunsford’s “Everyone’s an Author” where they talk about writing analytically and

how every decision, we make in our writing should have a purpose (Lunsford, 229). Specifically,

this made me go back and figure out if the information I was providing on my experiment and

my sources was beneficial to my readers or if it was just extra information. If the details could be

omitted without making the essay hard to read, I would change the information to add something

more meaningful to my paper. One other thing I revised during this paper was the background

information and the thesis. Dr. Nolen stated that I should “help familiarize [my] readers with this

historical topic by offering a brief background,” so I went back and added information about how

the pandemic has caused our world to go from constant face-to-face interaction to isolation.
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Lastly, he stated that my thesis needed more work, so I went back and made sure that my thesis

included all the points I talked about throughout the paper in order to make it more of a

“roadmap” to help familiarize my readers with what they were going to read. These changes

were made specifically because I thought they would benefit my paper the most and were not

insignificant changes like grammar.

Moving on to the revision process of Essay 2 (Essay 2: The Research Analysis Essay), seemed to

me the most confusing, but least complicated. Dr. Nolen commented that the way I went about

this essay would have been great for Essay 3, and that I needed to take a closer look at the rubric

of Essay 2 in order to hit the mark. To me the comment meant that I needed to start from scratch

and create a whole new essay in order to meet the guidelines, but I found that with a few extra

sentences I could manipulate what I had to make it better. The main thing that guided me through

this process was the “Essay 2 Prompt Research Analysis” that was provided inside the Essay 2

folder. I added a stronger hook to my essay in order to catch my readers attention, and then

provided more background information on what social media consists of and how this topic is

relevant to mostly everyone in this decade. I then went back and looked at each paragraph and

added sentences that would highlight any trends within different sources or provided the

significance of putting the sources within the same paragraph. This to me seemed like a better

way of presenting the different viewpoints of the topic at hand, and then evaluating why they

were important to my topic. I found that even if my essay was not good the first time around, I

did not need to start from step 1 in order to help it reach the expectation.

Lastly, Essay 3 (Essay 3: The Position Essay) was the simplest revision of them all. The

only useful critique I received from this essay was Dr. Nolen’s; he stated that my essay was

“missing opposing views and [a] counterargument” so I went back and added this. A

counterargument is simple, all the author needs to do is mention how some readers may have
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doubts or oppositions to their paper, they present the opposing view and then provide reasons as

to why these oppositions are invalid or not as significant as the author's position. The main tool

that guided me through this revision was chapters 18 and 19 of Lunsford’s “Everyone’s an

Author” (Lunsford 405). These two chapters focused solely on how to construct a good argument

and the different strategies to help support your argument. For reference, I took the information

from the “What About Other Perspectives?” section and used it to construct my

counterargument. In this section Lunsford states, “acknowledging other arguments […] is

another way of […] establishing your credibility – whereas failing to consider other views can

make you seem close-minded or lazy” (435) which really opened my eyes to the importance of a

counterargument. After seeing how this section of an argument is essential, I took the time to

curate a counterargument that would establish my ethos as a writer and still qualify my thesis.

In short, the topics discussed and learned throughout English 1302, are not only

beneficial to English courses, but can be applied to other courses during my time in college as

well as professional areas of life that require writing. English 1301 proved to be a useful

introductory course to this next level English course that allowed me to gain an understanding of

how communities use writing to better connect with each other. Once I went through this course,

I was better able to understand the research area of writing, which is the main thing I will take

with me after this course. College writing requires a lot of reading and analyzing studies that

have already been done, and then finding what you can do to add to the conversation at hand, so

being able to read peer-reviewed articles, analyze them, and then provide your own input to the

area of study is a very important skill every college student should develop. This paper is just a

short view of all the effort I put into the course in order to expand my knowledge and not only

grow as a writer, but as a student as well.