Clay Burgh

Eng 102

Second Reflection

Looking Back
Even through these first few weeks I feel like I have become a much better writer. The writer I

am now compared to who I was in high school is a completely different person. I never really enjoyed

writing exactly by the book, so I am thankful for some freedom on these projects. Having more freedom

has allowed me to try and create my own style of writing. Writing the same five paragraph papers can

get boring, but I found myself being much more interested in doing this project. I also found that it helps

to find a topic that I am truly interested in. My report was about a major road that I drive every day and

am constantly having issues with. I could relate to my own writing, which gave me a lot of confidence in

what I was putting into my paper.

I haven’t written a paper in over a year so going into it I was just nervous if I wasn’t going to be

able to portray my thoughts into my writing. Having everything set up from past assignments for the

project made it easy to write the actual report. One of my biggest struggles for this project was just

coming up with a problem in my community. Once the idea was set in stone it all really came together

from there. I learned that within a research report it is not important to add solutions. One of my

mistakes on my initial draft was saying that the city should add a stop sign, but that wasn’t really needed

or factual. One of my past projects that felt like this was one I did at my last school in Indiana. It focuses

on the legalization of marijuana and its benefits to the opioid epidemic that is very bad in Indianapolis.

Be interesting ESSAY1.docx

Citing interviews was new to me since I have never included one so heavily in writing before.

Through the peer feedback I learned that it was important to try and give the reader some sort of
connection to the interviewee. It is important to make the reader feel like the information they are

receiving from this interview is factual. Having trust between the reader and the sources was something

I tried to make stronger in my revision. I really enjoyed doing the interview and it made writing the

paper much easier.

Looking Forward

Looking forward, I would love to continue to grow and be more confident as a writer. I am

genuinely excited about writing our next assignment because I have much more confidence than I did a

month ago. I learned so much from just this one project and I think I will be able to incorporate some of

the skills I learned into our future projects.

The most important skill I think that will help me in the future was incorporating different

sources into my writing. I incorporated an interview, multiple articles, as well as images to provide the

readers with some visual context to my writing. I never realized that adding pictures to a report could

benefit the overall look and experience of my papers. One of the things I became infatuated with was

making my report look good, which I will continue to incorporate in the future. The interview process

was a bit out of my comfort zone, but after doing it I would like to incorporate something like that in any

research report going forward in here or other classes. Below is an example of one of research reports in

the past that is underwhelming. The progress from then to now was nice to see.

Our oceans research report.docx

In the past peer reviews have always been a bit of a struggle for me because I have always been

concerned with how people view me and my opinions. It is hard for me to give my opinions and not

come off as mean, but I feel like these reviews I tried to improve on that. Going forward I am confident I

can give constructive criticism and have it be received positively. After seeing my own reviews and giving
some out I think in the future I will be a much better reviewer. I think it is important to be able to take

criticism and learn from it, there is always room to be better at what you are doing. I think allowing

growth and leaving room for improvement is the best way to look forward.

Below is another one of my writings from my previous school in which I research the possible

end of nine to fives and the dangers of automation.

Be insightful.docx