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Alexa Vazquez

Professor Oscar Martinez

ENGL 1301-108

6 December 2023

Final Reflection Essay

Throughout this journey in this English course, I find myself at a place where I can meet

creativity and structure when expressing myself in my writings. The writing process within this

journey has really structured my writing and helped improve my final drafts in each step of the

way. Finding my own voice in this course opened lots of doors for me to start thinking critically,

analyze different communities, and embracing challenges I’ve faced throughout this semester.

Throughout this paper it’ll be a reflection on my different writing units and how it’ll shape me

throughout my different courses in the next few years.

What I’ve learned about the writing process of this course is that the writing process

has a lot of steps and they can be very helpful when writing your final draft. The process of the

writing assignments are prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing. The most I’ve learned from

these steps is that the prewriting stage is very important for me because sometimes I get stuck

and don’t know what to write about and brainstorming ideas leads me in a direction on what

possible ideas I can write about. The activities that helped me the most are the brainstorming

activities, when in the beginning of every unit we would have to collect three to five ideas on

what to write about for that unit and also leave information about the ideas if we ever wanted to

change our subject. This learning helps build upon my knowledge of the writing process

developed in my other courses by providing experience during this class and researching

different genres I’ve never written before which helps me expand my writing skills as well.
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What I’ve learned about analysis in this course is that you have to examine either

written text or visual text critically and unify the information to create meaningful reasoning on

this text. When trying to analyze written or visual text you have to dig deeper rather than just

viewing what you visually see, you have to dig deeper and see why the author puts those certain

appeals to reel in their audience. An assignment that helped me try to discover what appeals an

author is using was the Genre Analysis worksheet from the beginning of the semester. This

assignment had a lot of different genres to analyze the purpose of this community and if it was

successful to the audience. It made me dig deeper on why the author uses certain written and

visual text to catch the reader's attention.

I learned from revising once more on my second essay that I still need some help

when doing my thesis statement. In my feedback from my professor when I added my new thesis

statement, the mention of the image and the three elements I will talk about is there but I didn’t

mention what message the image is conveying. For example, I wrote “The men’s expressions

have a sarcastic scared look, in the background it shows a huge fire going all around Hollywood,

and the color scheme on the movie poster THIS is THE END (Fig.1) shows a lot of features in

the movie poster to get some information to see what it’s going to be about.”, to fix my thesis

statement to have both the three elements and to get the message across on what this image is

conveying I had to dig deep and see why those features are present for the audience to see. My

final thesis statement was “The six men’s expressions have a sarcastic scared look when standing

on top of a cracked road, the background looks like the Hollywood area is on fire, and the color

scheme of the movie poster shows off a clear message that an apocalypse is happening when

looking at the movie poster.” Another revision I did was deleting information that didn’t

correlate to the visual text analysis. In my final draft I wrote, “On the bottom of the movie title,
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there is a bottom comment “with Michael Cera and Emma Watson”. The author did this to show

more actors that people will enjoy watching if they didn’t know or like anyone om the movie

poster. It can bring a huge audience when adding more actors to the movie poster since people

would want to go watch the movie if they see one of their favorite actors.”. This sentence doesn’t

correlate to what I’m supposed to be writing about, which is the visual text and not any written

texts in the movie poster.

The most challenging aspect of revising this essay one last time was trying to describe

the color scheme to have more of a deeper meaning. In my final draft I wrote, “The color

contrast brings out more of the apocalyptic vibe to make it feel more real and bring everything

together.”. When I went over this essay I knew I needed more information of how an apocalyptic

vibe can feel like, which is dangerous and serious since people die in an apocalypse. It was

challenging to also dig deeper on how it’ll make the audience feel with these colors but after

describing the colors and what they represent it was clear to see that the choices of the colors

were to create a somber yet intriguing mood for the audience. The least challenging aspect of

revising this essay one more time was my topic sentences. It was clear after reading my essay

again that my topic sentences were not a brief explanation of the whole paragraph. For example,

in my second paragraph when describing the background, I wrote “In the background of the

movie poster there is fire going all around the Hollywood area.”. Revising this was easy since I

would just need to describe how the audience's eyes go towards the background next since it’s

super noticeable with the flashy colors of the fire. To fix the topic sentence I wrote, “The next

big thing the audience notices is the background of the six men since the colors of the

background are super flashy since there's fire going all around the Hollywood area.”.
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The choices I made to communicate course concepts like the writing process,

analysis, genre, rhetorical situation and etc. to a general audience on my website was to describe

what each unit was about and provide what my whole website will be about. In each page when

describing what type of unit it’s about I provide information about the unit and purpose the

author did when analyzing written or visual texts, and rhetorical situations. In my unit writing

assignment explanation I made the genre analysis, visual text analysis, and rhetorical analysis

understandable to someone who isn’t familiar with these genres by being clear on what my unit

is about and providing examples to make these concepts more understandable. For example in

my second essay I wrote “This genre relates to the artifacts I've analyzed because I write about

the different visuals from the movie poster and the purpose of why the author’s choose to leave

that there in the movie poster for their audience to see.”, this explanation is very helpful since I

explain what I’m looking for in a movie poster and the purpose of the author’s creativity in their

movie poster.

The most challenging aspect of this course was finding time to do all of these

assignments since I work and workout a lot during my free time. Doing these assignments

throughout the semester weren’t hard or difficult, it was just my time management that was super

challenging. A challenge I faced in the analysis and writing processes was the lack of clarity in

purpose. In my second essay when describing the color scheme of the background from the

movie poster “THIS IS THE END”, I lack the purpose of why the color scheme was flashy and

bright orange yet dark since it’s nighttime. After receiving my feedback from my professor I also

saw that in most of my essay’s I don’t go full in depth of the purpose of the genre. Another

example was organizing my thoughts and ideas in my essay’s. In the same essay, “THIS IS THE

END Analysis”, my paragraphs were not in order to the point when going to the next paragraph
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it didn’t make any sense. These two challenges really helped me understand what I really need to

work on and should go to tutoring to make sure I don’t make these mistakes again in a future

writing assignment.

The least challenging aspect of this course was citing and referencing sources I would

use throughout my writing assignments. When we first had to cite our source at the end of our

essay’s it was very simple by just adding a picture, cite or reference of what I’ve talked about

throughout the essay. For example, in the “THIS IS THE END Analysis” essay I put the movie

poster at the end of the essay and the reference of when it was made and the author who

produced this movie. Citing my sources was very important since I’m analyzing someone else’s

work and giving them credit for their work.

I believe this course did prepare me to become part of the academic writing

community by increasing my knowledge on researching skills, receiving feedback, and

understanding the audience in different communities. However, being part of the academic

writing community is not for me since writing is not my passion and I don’t really enjoy it since

you really have to sit down and only focus on that. Although, these skills that I’ve learned

throughout this course will help me in my future courses since I’m a Business Management

major. My researching skills can help me with reports that I need to do research on or some

creative ideas for a business. Receiving feedback helps me already have an idea that it’s okay to

get criticism so I can improve in my writing skills that I’ve missed when revising my own essay

and it helps for my future courses by allowing me to get criticism for any business ideas that

need to be worked on. Finally, understanding the audience in different communities can help me

figure out what type of audience I will be introduced to when creating a business and seeing

what attracts them to visit my ideas. Everyone has their own certain likings when entering a store
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or a restaurant so with the understanding of the audience I would get an idea of how to reel in

customers in one of my businesses later on in the future.

As this course goes into an end, I will still have other courses like this one but it

won’t be the same since this semester has been full of lessons and self-discovery throughout this

writing course. From starting from scratch in the prewriting to getting feedback in my drafts and

finally improving my final draft has come a long way in this course and will help me throughout

my other courses as well in the future.

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Works Cited Page

Mentzer, Mike. Time to Cheat. Vol. 57. Woodland Hills: Weider Publications LLC, 1996. Print.

Poster for the movie This Is The End. Sony Pictures (2013)

https://movienonsense.com/2013/10/08/this-is-the-end-e-o-fim/

Appendix

Figure 1. Poster for the movie This Is The End.(2013).