Reflective Tag: This essay is reflection of my writing that I have done in college. It notes my strengths, weaknesses, and things I want to continue to work on. This piece is really to make my teacher aware of what I have learned in ERH101, evaluate what kind of a writer I am, and assess my weaknesses to focus on for the remainder of the semester.
Download Link: ERH102ReflectionEssay
Olivia Cotton
ERH 102-06
Mrs. Smith
1/17/15
Reflection Essay
To claim that last semester English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic studies 101 made me a writer I think would be false. I still would not call myself a writer, but I believe it helped me to write better. I came to college with the expectations that my current writing ability would no where near meet the standards and I in turn would struggle to write these long 20 page essays on complicated topics. Last semester that was not my experience, we had 3-4 page essays on topics that focused on writing and so we ended up writing about writing. Although, it was not an easy topic it was enlightening to my weaknesses in my writing, but I did meet the writing standards of ERH 101 and made it through my first college writing class. Based on feedback given from my teacher, I realized that I had a lot of trouble with essay organization, providing evidence, and deeper analysis.
In essay one, I learned that I struggled with essay organization. We wrote our first essay on a syllabus from one of our other courses and wrote about a specific assignment and how it related to the class. When reviewing this essay with MAJ Heard some of his feedback was that my ideas were good, but not very well organized. I would try and mix two concepts and combine it in the same paragraph versus doing separate paragraphs with complete, thorough thoughts. His advice to me in helping to fix this is to just outline my essay before I write. Because I was always writing my essay last minute I thought it would take up more time to outline my essay, but it turns out when your thoughts are clearly outlined it makes the writing process easier, which makes it faster. Also, ERH 101 taught me that when outlining it is important to focus on more then just the structure of the essay, but it also just as important if not important to focus on the analysis and content of the essay.
In the second essay titled “Social Norms” I struggled with picking evidence to support my analysis of social norms, I knew what kind of evidence I needed, but didn’t take the time to find evidence that truly enhanced my essay versus just fulfilled the requirements. When I did find evidence that semi-supported what I was trying to say I wasn’t sure what evidence I needed and what evidence wasn’t that important so I essentially cited an entire paragraph with little editing. In citing this entire paragraph I lost all value of the evidence and it was hard to follow my support. This problem did not just occur in this essay, but also my other essays that I wrote last semester. Besides not knowing what evidence was best for my support I often did not take the time to find the best support. This goes with procrastinating I had trouble with the quotes, because I procrastinated so long on my essay I was rushing to just get it done. ERH 101 taught me that the key to evaluating a source starts when you’re reading your text. It is important that we don’t read with a subjective eye just looking for what we believe to be facts. It is easier to find evidence for facts if when you are reading you are trying to read with an objective eye and think of arguments against or for when you read. It might take longer when reading, but it will benefit you when you go to write.
My next big problem is, I for the most part only gave surface level analysis. Assuming that I do provide good evidence and am doing analysis my problem then becomes not just explaining the quote, but analyzing the quote. I know what it is that I want to say, but I have trouble forming it in words. I have a habit of not providing a statement that adds values to my paper, but just adds fillers. What I was taught in middle school is to provide the evidence and then one to two sentences of support. The support didn’t even have to have anything of value, just as long as the structure looked right it was if the content was not important. ERH 101 taught me to not worry about the three paragraph format structure, but use as many sentences that it requires to fully support my point.
ERH 101 I believed helped me because it enlightened me on what a lot of my weaknesses in my writings are. This semester I am worried that I am going to procrastinate on my essays to the extent I will have the problem of not providing good evidence. I really want to focus on my analysis this semester so that I feel like I am actually saying something of value in my essays. I believe that if I better organize my essays it would be a lot easier for me to pick evidence and know the clear support that I need for my essay. I am hoping that because I know what problems I need to be aware of I will be able to identify them as I write and try and make changes before being corrected.