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David Pena

Dr. Shairty Nelson

English 1301

12/4/23

Final Reflection Essay

1. What did you learn about the writing process in this course? What activities or homework

helped you understand the writing process and how to do it? How did this learning build

upon your knowledge of the writing process developed in other courses? Give examples,

explain, and be specific.

I learned that while it's difficult, you can be a good writer. It took a lot of time for me to

adjust to the college way of writing things. Instead of being able to just write an essay with a

bunch of words now I had to think. I had to put actual effort in, instead of just coasting with my

essays like I did in high school. I feel like the professor breaking the writing process down

helped me understand better than I used to. I used to think that hey, “I wrote something, let’s turn

it in!” How foolish I was. Now I understand that ya, I can be a great writer, but ultimately it

wouldn’t matter with my first draft. A first draft can be garbage, but that’s the point of writing.

Making garbage, and then refining that garbage into something you could be proud of as a writer.

Even once you are past that it still reminds you that doing something alone is not really that

feasible with peer review. Thanks to peer review, you can see all the little, or not so little

mistakes you made while writing. Yes it is difficult to watch someone tear apart something you

made, but ultimately it’s part of the process to make a proper essay. For example, the first draft I
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turned in to my professor, she tore apart. It is understandable why she tore it apart too, there were

mistakes, and it did not even really follow the format it was meant to properly. Yet thanks to her

and a friend’s help I got to refine it. The process of writing can be difficult, and can take some

time, but it’s possible.

2. What did you learn about analysis in this course? What activities or homework helped

you understand the process of analysis and how to work through it? Give examples,

explain, and be specific.

I learned that analysis is much more in depth than I initially thought. Instead of just being

able to bluntly look at something, and be able to understand it in depth off the bat. You need to

actually think, bother to look at what you’re analyzing and let yourself ask questions about it. I

think the best example of an activity we did together would be that poster we analyzed from

NASA. At first glance we all had different ideas, all fairly simple. Yet as we spent more time

looking into it, bothering to think about it. We realized it may be more complex than we thought.

We started to deconstruct the poster, and the poster itself. If I had to give a description of it here.

It’d be two astronauts standing behind a fence. Beyond that fence is a massive red forest, and

behind it is a well kept lawn of red grass. Already this suggests several things, one such being an

alien environment. Other factors help hammer this point home, such as the two astronauts, or

rather the protective suits they are wearing. Then there was of course the assignments I did on

my own, my favorite analysis probably being the visual analysis of a film poster. I looked at the

film poster of the movie “Hereditary” and I had a great time breaking down the poster and its

elements. Since there was just so much to dive into just on a surface level. There were plenty of

questions the poster raised, and I got to discuss them. The process of analyzing anything is
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an in depth process, but I learned it can be a rather pleasant one as well.

3. What did you learn from the process of revising, once more, one of your essays (a unit

writing assignment)? Describe the choices you made when revising that essay. Identify

2-3 specific elements of your final draft that you changed based on instructor feedback,

in-class activities, or overall course concepts and explain why and how you made

changes.

I learned that I need to work on how I write, and the stuff I focus on. When it came to

revising my essay my professor played a major part in figuring out how I’d do it. Instead of just

trusting my own opinion I was lucky in the fact I was able to get help from my professor. (A fact

I learned is fairly abnormal for college.) The largest difficulty I had when it came to transitioning

to college from highschool was without a doubt my writing style. In the words of my professor,

“It is written well, but written as if it’s a blog.” I had the skill, I had the drive, but I did not have

proper direction. It showed in the other major point she criticized. That being the fact that my

paragraph’s focus was all over the place. Either it was I switched focus mid paragraph, or I had

two focuses instead of one. While having two sounds great, all it does is just hurt your writing

and any points you try to make. I had to change how I write for the assignments I did this

semester. While I did not do the greatest job of changing, that is understandable since this is just

my first go at it. I had to change how I wrote in order to make it fit the informal essay format,

and that was the hardest part. Though I did have to change how I wrote my body paragraphs as

well, that was just me getting my focus together. Instead of focusing on several things I just

refined and focused on what I wanted to. It was hard, but I learned how to go with it, till

eventually it did click for me.

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4. What was the most challenging aspect of revising this essay one last time? Least

challenging? Give examples, explain, and be specific.

I figure you want to know how it was like revising the final essay, and well it was fairly

difficult. One of the roadblocks was that I had to figure out the journal I used for it. That being

“Strain-Dependent Prion Infection in Mice Expressing Prion Protein with Deletion of Central

Residues 91-106” It was a medical peer reviewed journal, and what I had to do was analyze the

use of logos, ethos, and pathos within it. Does not sound too difficult, but the problem came in

the fact I barely understood it. I am a smart person, and I love anything to do with the medical

field, but this paper went more in depth than anything I have seen before. To put it plainly I

chucked myself into the deep end, and got all surprised when I could in fact, not swim. Of course

once I got that figured out the other difficult bit came in. I had to choose which examples of

Logos, Ethos, and Pathos I wanted to use for my essay. It was difficult for logos and ethos

because I had to select an example of credibility, or logic being used in a peer reviewed medical

journal. Something that is built off of those. Then when it came to pathos it raised the question,

“Where does emotion even fit in this journal?” It is a journal built of facts, and logic, not really

something like a newsletter where they need tug at heartstrings to get clicks or views. The least

challenging part though was understanding what was logos, ethos, and pathos. Since a squad of

classmates gave a presentation about it, wonderful presentation by the way. Thanks to it I was

able to understand what was originally a foreign concept to me. Though despite some parts being

simple there was still a fair bit of difficulty in figuring out how to write it.

5. What choices did you make to communicate course concepts (like the writing process,

analysis, genre, rhetorical situation, etc.) to a general audience on your website? In your
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unit writing assignment explanations, how did you make the genre analysis, visual text

analysis, and rhetorical analysis understandable to someone who is unfamiliar with these

genres? Identify 2-3 specific elements in your explanations and explain why and how you

used them to communicate effectively.

I just explained them. I made a page for every essay unit, and then I took some time to

explain the importance of each essay. It was tedious at first, but as I went through each unit I

soon enough figured out the swing of things. The explanations I offered were fairly simple. I

explained what the concept behind it was, and the way it applied to me. In fact I put something

from the website here. I am not stealing any work since it’s my own, so here’s a example from

my website

“This is my first outline for figuring out my essay's structure. Its whole purpose is to help give

me an outline, or idea of what I am supposed to write for this assignment. And it is broken into

five sections, each for a part of the essay.

The first section is devoted for the introduction, and is the most in depth part of the assignment.

It has us breakdown the whole of the poster's contents and purpose. Breaking the poster down to

its key parts to help give us an idea on what we are writing about, and why. Once we have an

idea of that, we could build what our introduction for this essay is going to be. A little

deconstruction, and then the creation process.

The next three sections are just about creating your body paragraphs. It asks for a point, for you

to give quoted evidence on that point, and then give an explanation on it. One of the points I
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made was about the title of the poster. How it gave us context for what this poster was about, and

of course I backed it up as well. Explaining my line of thought, and that repeated till we reached

the fifth section.

The fifth section was the outro, and it just has us restate the idea we had in our intro. The why,

and how our poster did its job. This was likely the simplest part since all we need to do for it is

just explain what we already had in the intro again as our closing statement.”

In the explanation above I explained the process of the assignment, and the parts of it. I take my

time to break it down, taking time to give a detailed explanation about it.

6. What was the most challenging aspect of this course? What challenges did you face in the

analysis and writing processes? Give examples, explain, and be specific.

The most challenging aspect of this course would without a doubt be the fact I had to

change how I write. As stated in a question before this I write as if I am writing a blog post, and

while that seems all fine and dandy, it doesn’t get you a good grade, So I needed to work on how

I wrote, and approached writing assignments. The best example of that change would likely be

seen in my second essay. It was like a middle ground for me, showing me attempting to get out

of that way of writing, while still having major influences from it. Then for analysis the greatest

challenge was likely figuring out how to analyze at all. Instead of really having an idea for what I

was looking for I just ended up having to grab whatever I thought was important. The lack of

idea showed the most when it came to my first attempt at analysis with the informational poster. I

wanted to write about its title, subtitle, and text. Though some of those did really not count as

points, and I did not understand that for a bit. It took a conference with both my professor, and a
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peer before I figured out what I was doing wrong. The most challenging part of this course

overall was the adjustment I was forced to make. Having to learn how I had to do things all over

again.

7. What was the least challenging aspect of this course? What strengths did you discover in

your analytical and writing skill sets? Give examples, explain, and be specific.

The easiest part was likely the deconstructing of the film poster, or rather working with

works of fiction instead of nonfiction pieces of work. Due to the fact I often spend my free time

listening to deconstructions of characters, or the works they reside in, my strengths lie in

working with fiction. Such as the poster from the movie “Hereditary” From just the poster alone

I theorized that the film was about the effects of grief on one’s world. From the graveyard scene

to the darkness creeping on the world above it nudges one towards the idea of grief being major.

While it is not good for writing informal essays about formal works, I personally love working

pieces of fiction. One of my best essays was about Sthepen King’s “The Shining” Since while I

struggle to work with pieces of nonfiction, I can look at a character, a poster, or even a title, and

give a good deconstruction. I’m proud of that since I know what I’m good at, and while it may

not be the focus of the course, I like deconstructing works of fiction.

8. Do you feel that this course prepared you to become a part of the academic writing

community? Explain and be specific.

I believe this course did help prepare me for my academic writing future. How it did so

was essentially letting me know what type of world I am stepping into. Now instead of entering

the rest of it lost like I did for my english course. I have some clues. Do I think I will be fully

ready for what’s to come? No, but that is okay. I came to college to learn, and that is what I have
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been doing. It was difficult during English 1301 sure, but that’s just how learning is at times.

Sometimes it’s difficult, other times we can coast through, but it’s a spectrum. Learning is a

broad process and term, but I think this course prepared me for whatever the next few courses

might throw at me, and I appreciate that. So when you read this professor, thank you for

preparing us for whatever else college may throw.

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Works Cited

Uchiyama, K., Miyata, H., Yamaguchi, Y., Imamura, M., Okazaki, M., Pasiana, A. D., Chida, J.,

Hara, H., Atarashi, R., Watanabe, H., Kondoh, G., & Sakaguchi, S. (2020). Strain-dependent

prion infection in mice expressing prion protein with deletion of central residues 91–106.

International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 21(19), 7260.

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms21197260

Aster, Ari,, et al. Hereditary. Santa Monica, CA, Lionsgate, 2018.