reflective essay

Brittney Miller

Professor Thomas

Composition 102

2 May 2013

Reflective Essay

I have always said that over the years in school I struggled in English. I love reading and writing, but always had a hard time with writing essays and researching papers. When I was in the 101 Composition Course I learned many useful tips to improve my writing and reading skills. However, leaving the course I still struggled with a couple of minor areas. Coming into the 102 Course I was very excited on other new ways I can improve my reading and writing skills. The new ideas, tools, and lessons really improved me as a writer and reader.

One of the examples of a helpful lesson that I learned was when we talked about rhetorical analysis. Before I never sat and thought about why the author wrote or how the writer wrote the way he/she did. The lesson on rhetorical analysis improved my critical thinking because it made me look deeper into the article and made me analysis on why the author said what he/she said and why the author said it the way that they did. I also learned about questions to ask myself while reading articles, like what is the message? Who make up the audience? Or what kind of style and tone is used and for what purpose? Asking these questions help me as a reader because I can fully understand what I’m reading and it is much easier to find research on the article because I now know what the article is about and therefore know what to research. Another helpful lesson that I learned, was knowing what fallacies were. I never learned what a fallacy was until this course. Learning about this really helped me as a reader because now I can pick out sentence’s in an article that shows examples of the fallacies and know why the author structured the sentence in that way.

In Composition 101 I learned about many useful tools that helped me with my reading in writing skills. Coming into the 102 class I still learned new tools that I didn’t know before that really helped me in the classroom. I still love using diigo, I will always tell other people who don’t know about diigo to start using it for researching and other things. It really helped me while I research because it allows me to highlight my article online and post notes on the article. The other useful tools that I learned about in the 102 class are the use of podcast/vodcast. I never knew about these tools but I am thankful that I was taught about them in this course. The podcast really helped me fully understand what rhetorical analysis was. Also it was really fun working in groups to make this assignment.

The new ideas that helped me as a researcher was the use of goggle scholar, I was never told or taught about Google scholar and I was surprised to learn that goggle can do more than what I thought it could. Having another way to find creditable research for my paper it took a lot of stress off me because I do not have to worry about if the article is reliable or not. I also learned about helpful tips in writing my thesis sentence. I also had struggled with this in all my English courses. This 102 course taught me many different ways on how to write a good strong thesis sentence. Also the use of partners in class also helped me with writing a thesis statement because I can get their feedback on how I can improve my thesis and get some of their tips on ways that they wrote theirs.

I believe that there are some areas that I can improve in, for an example I still need to work on conciseness and using good word choice in my papers. But I also believe that from my 101 class to my 102 class I feel more confident as a reader and writer. I’m beginning to feel good about each paper that I do and turn in, I also catch myself saying “I really did a good job on my thesis this time!” or “This paper was way better than the last one!” However, the area that I still struggle in is my conclusion paragraph. I also tend to run out of information in the conclusion paragraph because I feel that I already talked about everything in the previous paragraphs. I know that I learned to try to write on something new for the reader and tie everything together, but I still struggle with doing this. But with the use of all the information that I learned for 101 and 102 I am confident that I can still hold on to all my ideas, lessons and tools to be able to improve my conclusion paragraph over the next years.