Doan 1

Tien Doan
Professor Adler
English 1A STACC, #32474
5 May 2015
Reflection of my English 1A work
Time passes fast and it is already a school year since I came to Pasadena City College.
When I stepped the first time to English 100 STACC class, everything was strange and I was shy
to speak up or express my opinion. Looking forward to the future, after this English 1A class, I
see that I have grown a lot. I became more confident and improved my English skills. My
essays got better analysis and I learned different ways of writing. I proud of my my two essays,
rhetorical essay and discourse community essay, because I put so much effort into them. From
my rhetorical essay, I learned different methods that authors use in their writing to persuade
readers. I also improved my analysis skills and put more own though to my essays. The
discourse community essay helped me improve my research skill, gained more information about
the major I want to do in the future. In this essay I will reflect what I learned throughout English
1A STACC by rhetorical essay and discourse community essay.
The second essay in English 1A class was rhetorical essay. In this essay, I had to connect
Jimmy Santiago Bacas book A Place to Stand to one of the two article Civil Disobedience by
Henry David Thoreau, and Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, then prove
that they are change writers. In the process of reading these articles, I learned different ways for
authors use to persuade readers in their writing. Authors persuade by using logos, logic
reasoning, ethos, writers characteristic, and pathos, emotional writing. When I read these
articles, I paid attention to every single scenes and words the author used, so I could analyzed

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and proved that they are persuasive writers. One example, in my essay I analyzed how Baca
used words to bring emotion to readers, I wrote All of this words choice [allowed, confront,
gave, opened] show Baca feels literacy is so powerful that it could help him, save him and
turn him into a different person (Tien Doan 3). In this paragraph I showed how each word Baca
used affect readers emotions, and helped them to understand his experience and emotion. I
prove that by one single quote, Baca wanted to express how grateful he felt when language saved
his life and changed him to different person. Through this essay, I learned how to do rhetorical
analysis to analyze people writing skills. I also gained more knowledge that I could use in future
like determining should I blindly believe in a piece of writing or not. I also learned from Baca
and Kings methods of persuade readers in their writing.
Essay number three, the discourse community essay is the one that brought me the most
struggles. In this essay, I needed to analyze language use in a discourse community I want to
join in future, the language that only member inside this community could understand. One of
the requirements in this essay is interview someone who in the discourse that I want to analyze.
This freaked me out because I did not know what question I should ask or who should I
interview. In class, we discussed about which questions should include in the interview and it
helped me out a lot. But still I did not know who should I interview, then my friend
recommended me to send as much interview emails out for professors in this major, so at least
one of them could reply. I sent seven out through the email addresses I got online, then one
professor reply my interview. I was able to use her answers in my essay as an example of how
special vocabulary use discourse community.
In the discourse community essay, I faced another problem that I could not understand
the genres, special vocabulary, the discourse community used because I am an outsider. Also the

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discourse community I choose to analyze was about electrical engineering major, so they all used
high standard vocabulary. I had to put time to research to understand those genres, so I could
write the analysis. For example, in my essay, the quote I used mention one of the genres Fast
Henry , in order for me to analyze that quote, I needed to understand what that genre stand for.
Then I explained it in my essay that Fast Henry is efficient techniques for inductance extraction
of complex 3D geometries. For simplicity, you just need to know that Fast Henry is a simple
tool on a computer system that when you enter data like height, width, thickness the computer
will give you the inductance in the system (Tien Doan 4). I needed to explain what Fast Henry
was to prove to my readers that if you are the outsider of this discourse community. If you do
not know the definition of Fast Henry, then you would not know what they explained about. By
this definition, I also proved that the discourse community often use genres in their
communication so that outsider could not understand. This essay also helped me realize that I
like to do research paper. Research paper is the most difficult essay student have to do because
they need to put time in to research source, then analyze it. For me, I started like doing research
after this essay because I gained more knowledge through the process of finding source.
From a girl who hated reading and writing essay because English is my second language,
After English 1A class, reading became normal, and writing naturally came out from my mind.
My writing skill got better, I knew how to do analysis essay and research paper. Also, from all
the reading we done in class, I learned to have positive mindset when challenges come and try
harder to overcome my weakness instead of giving up. Next semester, I will be taking Physical
Science 2. I hear that in that class I will read a lot of nonfiction, and writing analysis and
research paper about them. I look forward for that class, and keep writing to help improve my
skills. I know that in the future, for my major I will need to write research papers so I want to

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practice more for that skill. After this English 1A class, I feel that writing became so much easier
to handle, I do not look down on myself anymore.