Rivera 1

Andres Rivera

Mr. Powers

English 1302

9-25-2023

Reflection Essay 1

After writing my first writing assignment for my English 1302 class being an Annotated

Bibliography research document, I learned to properly cite, format in MLA, learn more on how

to find peer-reviewed articles, how to communicate in peer review with my colleagues, and

complete a whole Annotated Bibliography.

This Annotated Bibliography has been a rollercoaster of educational learning. After

completing it although, it has been a process that will definitely help me in the near future with

all my classes. Almost every class that I have taken has required a writing assignment which

goes to show how important learning how to do research is because if you want to do a great

paper you must do research on it to gather all the evidence and ideas and bring it all together to

create a strong argument. One example is for my corrections class I had to write an

argumentative essay about whether having punishment is good or not. So, with this, I went

through peer-reviewed articles and gathered quotes, information, statistics, data, and ideas.

Having my articles really gave me an insight into my topic. I have got very informative

information and data. I was able to provide statistics from cases where punishment wasn’t

present and correlated with the crime rates. Which ultimately led my paper to have strong

concrete evidence that has been backed up by scholarly people.

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So, in a sense this Annotated Bibliography will help me in my research by giving me a deep

understanding of my research. For example, if I were to get a topic and I just write about it from

the top of my head, I will most likely not have a strong research paper. This is because I haven’t

actually studied this topic. It would be like trying to teach a subject that you have very minimal

experience with. Now when you get all your information together and now have your research

done you can use this to have a strong research paper with evidence that is backed up. From now

on in the future, an Annotated Bibliography will help me get into an essay with more confidence

and research. This will overall help it be stronger and more accurate.

After peer reviewing with my colleagues, they mentioned many details on my Annotated

Bibliography that gave me a realization of some of my mistakes. Some examples of my mistakes

that were pointed out by my colleagues were not having my topic on my Annotated

Bibliography, not having a correct citation, adding more examples, and not having repetitive

word usage. After seeing my colleague’s comments, I realized that my word usage on “re-entry”

was way too repetitive. I ended up changing it to re-imprisonment to change it up and not use re-

entry as much. I also included my topic on my research assignment in order for my audience to

know what exactly what my research was about. He also mentioned that I didn’t add enough

examples, so I went back to my Annotated Bibliography and to my articles and made sure to

include some to help create evidence throughout the annotated bibliography. One of the

comments I had was from Mr. Powers, he mentioned how my citation was wrong and within his

class he actually showed us how to correctly format the citation in MLA which was very helpful.

Overall although, these comments on my Annotated Bibliography helped me definitively make it

better and easier for my audience to understand.

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The overall most challenging part of this assignment had to be the time frames. Having to

juggle doing assignments from one class to the next and the due dates was very challenging.

Also having work on top of that and reading full articles created a stressful process but overall,

the actual assignment was very easy. Of course, reading is my favorite thing to do, but as a

college student it is necessary. The easiest part of this assignment definitely has to be

summarizing what I read from the article. Once I read the article it felt like a breeze to just

paraphrase all the things I read and having to finally finish each one.

After everything although, the process of writing an Annotated Bibliography was very

interesting! From learning how to properly write one to also learning about my topic in the

meantime which will aid me in the process of doing so. So overall, I enjoyed the assignment

process and how helpful Mr. Powers was throughout it.