Guzman III 1

Francisco Guzman III

ENGL 1302 – 207

Ana Mendoza

9 March 2024

Reflection essay 2

For this writing assignment, I learned how to properly read through journal articles in a manner

that is efficient and impactful. I learned how to properly retain the knowledge from these writings and

incorporate them into my own by properly summarizing the key topics present in each one. I also learned

how to properly organize this information in a manner that is easy to understand for the reader as well as

properly giving credit to the authors through citations in the MLA format. This will be essential for the

rest of my academic career as I will need to write many papers for many classes in the future. I will also

need to retain the skill of being able to read through long papers and be able to summarize the ideas from

these articles as many classes pertaining to my major, being a history major, require me to read through

articles like the ones used in this writing.

One of the obvious processes and information I used from the annotated bibliography in this

writing assignment was the 8 journal articles that I was able to use from that assignment in this

assignment. This saved me time as I did not have to find new material to use in this assignment and

instead was able to pick 8 out of the 10 journal articles to use in this assignment. I was also able to use the

previous assignment which had summaries of each of the articles in order to finish this writing

assignment quicker as I did not have to skim through each of the articles a second time as all the

information was already available to me.

The creation of a literature review essay is helpful in my research as it gathers the basic ideas of

each journal article and compresses it into an easily readable format. This saves me time as I am able to
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quickly view the information rather than having to read through the entire article over again which can be

tedious as some of the journal articles are over 20 pages long. This literature review essay has helped me

understand a format in which I can gather my information into an easily accessible paper that can be used

to further build upon any argument I wish to make in any paper. This is useful as many of my classes will

require me to write papers with peer-reviewed articles that may be long and tedious to go through

individually.

Receiving feedback from professors and peers is a vital part of the writing process as it allows

you to learn about mistakes in your writing that you may have not noticed at first glance. While I was not

able to get professor feedback due to spring break, I was able to look through my paper a second time in

order to find mistakes I may have not noticed when writing my first draft. I also got peer reviews from my

friends as they read through my essay and pointed out how some of my information was unnecessary and

tended to bloat up the writing.

The most challenging part of this essay was finding a way to make all the information present in

my journal articles blend together in order to make an essay that provided the reader and myself with

topics that may be similar throughout each of the writings as well as the many different viewpoints each

writing had with each other. While most of the articles had the same general topic amongst each other,

some provided different arguments that contradicted each other which was a bit challenging to fit in. The

least challenging part of this assignment was finding the information present in each article as I had

already gathered and summarized the general ideas of each article in my previous writing assignment.

While I did have to skim through each original article on occasion to see if I missed any information

present in them, overall, the amount of time I spent having to look through these articles was decreased

thanks to my previous writing assignment.

Overall, this writing assignment had its challenges as any writing assignment does; however,

thanks to the help of my previous writing assignment, I was able to complete this assignment in a quick

and efficient manner. This writing assignment as well as many other that may be present in this course are
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working to build my knowledge and skills needed for college and any other future endeavor I may partake

in.