Reflection Essay

We have reached the midpoint of the semester. Two long months of continuous reading, writing, and annotating; article after article, paper after paper. As much as I dread reading and writing, I am glad to say that I have improved substantially since my first days in your English 5A class. Although there are still some aspects of my writing I have yet to improve on, I have made significant strides on improving my grammar, sentence structure, and the transitions from paragraph to paragraph. Evidence of my improvements are visible on my first two major writing projects this semester; “College Writing For The Incoming Freshman” and “Segregation Is Over, Right?”. Aside from writing, I have also improved on my analytical skills and rhetorical skills.

It wasn’t until I started reading “From Inquiry To Academic Writing” and “They Say I Say” that I began to understand what college writing was really about. College writing isn’t just about stating your thesis and supporting it, it’s about forming an argument around your thesis using different voices other than our own. In order to use other voices in support of my argument, I had to be capable of reading and annotating various articles and essays to gather enough information from different voices, to piece together my own voice. As nervous as I was, writing my first college paper, I had to utilize my “rhetorical skills” to convince you that I understood and was ready for college writing. Although I didn’t clearly know what rhetorical strategies were, this essay helped me discover that rhetorical skills referred to the choices I make as a writer when I consider both my audience and purpose and the rhetorical moves of other writers. Overall project one gave me a taste of college writing, which later helped me prepare for project

The idea was simple, write an informative summary about educational problems in the United States. What I did find challenging about project two, though, was that we couldn’t use “I”. Project two felt more like a research paper where we could express our opinions, but it was contrary, we had to use someone else 's voice to get our argument across to our audience. Although the information was given to me, and all I had to do was paraphrase, I still found it difficult to use Tatum’s information to argument my own. Reading and analyzing played a major part in the process of writing my paper. Repetitive reading and annotation of Tatum’s work was frustrating, almost annoying, but I couldn’t complain because after all it was from my annotations and comprehension of her writing that I would compose my own argument. As far as revisions and drafts, I believe project two is the most well written from the both projects I have submitted. Having completed a peer revision workshop for the paper really helped me improve my following drafts for project two. It also helped that the workshop was held right after the due date, because all the information was still fresh in my head. Unlike project one, where we revised almost a month later, it was more difficult to compose a better draft because I had to revisit the information necessary to successfully write an improved