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Mahi Wazee

Professor Beadle

English 115

May 10 2019

Reflection

Where do I start? First off all I’m not that great at writing essays. And the essays I did

this semester are considerably harder than any of the essays I have worked on earlier in my life.

It may just be the jump from high school to college or maybe it’s because English is my weak

subject. All the essay assignments I did this semester were taxing for me. It probably is because I

do not really enjoy the subject. I feel as if I did not do the best I could have done, and it reflects

on my grades. For all three essays I did, I did not receive a grade higher than a “C”. But I do feel

like I did improve in some respects throughout the semester in this class. The first major one

would be finding sources. Compared to my past essays, I feel as if I have gained the ability to

research much better than before. Previously I would just go to Google, type in some phrases

related to the topic I was working on, and voila. I would only choose sources from the first two

pages of the search engine. But in this class, I was taught to use much more credible learning

resources. And it shows. For the essays in this class, I would legitimately spend around forty-five

minutes to an hour to only pull out one citable source. So in that aspect I improved a lot. Another

thing I believe I improved immensely on was my analytical skills, at least comparatively to how

it was before. But I think it could still do better. Previously I would not give that much effort or

just would have a hard time breaking down material. Some other things that I understood more in

depth in this class were Logos, Pathos, and Ethos. Did not have much knowledge in those
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subjects. I understood how to write a better thesis and the questions that you are supposed to

answer with it. And there is the basic punctuation (something I will always have to work on).

The first assignment we had was Project Space. In my opinion, I believe this was the

hardest of all the essays we did in this class. I just found the concept of transforming spaces to

find happiness complex. But that helped in way. The way it helped me was that I needed to

analyze the text to the point where I would understand the topic and put down my claims on the

paper and argue about. It made me look at three perspectives or how one could change spaces,

and the different types of spaces. In a way this helped how to compare and differentiate. What I

had a lot of trouble with and did not do a lot of the time was interpreting quotes. But in this essay

I gained the ability to explain a quote or a claim and use it to support my argument or use it to go

against a counterargument. One problem I have with essays in general is that the quotes I use are

too long. I also fell victim to that in this essay, especially in Lyubomirsky’s example. But

throughout working on this assignment, I learned how to deduct unnecessary info and interpret

the example I gave. Another problem I resolved in this assignment was that I was prone to

writing summaries a lot of the time. I put in a lot excess information. Then I got my preventing

that. Just put in the important stuff and focus on the main points.

The second assignment we had was the Project Text Essay. Comparatively with the other

two essay assignments, this was the easiest. You could say the hardest aspect of the assignment

was trying to find the right sources to back up your claim and thesis. What I had to fix when I

was revising this essay was to explain how the story was an allegory. And when doing that I put

use to the analytical skills I developed in this course. Of course it was not my strong point so I

still had some mistakes and stuff like that, but overall, I believe that I had done much better than

before. And as I mentioned, the hardest part of this assignment was doing the research. But the
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result of doing the research led to me achieving better researching skills. I was also better able to

analyze characters and how to relate it to the real world. I was able to explain the examples I had

provided which I use to have a lot of trouble doing. But what I still need to improve on is how

my sources support my argument to a high degree.

The last assignment we worked on was the Project Media Essay. This was the essay

where we wrote an argumentized essay after watching the Japanese film Godzilla. And like the

previous essay, the challenging part of this essay was finding the right sources supporting my

argument. If I recall correctly, it took me roughly three hours to find two sources to back up my

argument. That was a lot of research and reading. A lot of what I did in this essay was comparing

Godzilla to the real world an how we could relate to the monster. And comparing and contrasting

with evidence is something I am not that great at. But as I went on to work in this assignment, I

found out it was pretty simple when you had credible sources, which I got from improving my

researching skills when doing the Project Text assignments. And finally the last thing I had

trouble with in this assignment was coming up a counterargument. And I just suck at

counterarguments. And with the peer reviews I was able to learn how to do counterarguments.