Category: ERH 102-12 Spring 17

Reflective Essay for 102-2fm7a3m

Reflective Essay for 102-2fluejk

Journal –

To be blatantly honest, I have struggled in ERH 102 compared to how I did in ERH 101. The material is much more in depth and requires a ton more time dedicated to research and evidence. I have learned the strategies and techniques that are considered “good” for writing research papers, but I often find myself lost and just writing down random facts that hopefully back my thesis. I expected ERH 102 to be like 101 in that in 101 I felt like we went over topics more thoroughly. I did not expect to be doing a lot of research compared to how much we actually had to do. Picking topics was more difficult because of the nature of the prompt. This all does pay into the fact of how poorly managed my time with english, I found myself focusing on my Electrical Engineering Classes and it effected my writing. In ERH 102, I focus more on what I thought and felt towards a subject and made claims that I did not back with evidence. I lost my credibility due to my ignorance of the fact that I had no way of proving my claims.

As I wrote my first paper I wrote about legislation that was created to prevent sexual offenders from transferring schools and enrolling in them after they got kicked out of the previous school. For this assignment we had to side with the opposing view and for this specific topic it was hard to because I could not find evidence to back my reasoning. That is what I struggled with the most was finding good evidence that supported my claim. For the second paper I switched up my topic and got to be for the legislation I chose. This time the evidence was easier to find and I feel like I successfully got my points across that I needed to.

Garriott is obviously always the hardest on us, but for good reason. She wants us to realize our mistakes and learn from them. In my first paper I started off my paper making claims that I couldn’t back or just chose not to because I was trying to be humorous, but I found out that wasn’t going to work. Instead, I needed to focus on just getting the background in for the rest of my paper. So the audience could understand what it was they were about to read. When I go my peer review back, I saw that my peer reviewer had said the exact same thing. So for my next paper I worked on backing my claims with evidence that I had found and it made the paper flow more smoothly.

*The bold font in the first paragraph is my activity 4*

My first bit of evidence comes from the first paragraph in my first essay which. This is a claim I made in the intro to try and kick of a sexual assault paper. I make the claim referring to VMI saying, “The only sexual assault that goes on is the occasional slap on the ass for jon well done on the drill field.” This was a claim that I just simply do not have evidence for. Their is no research backing this because it is so specific to this school and I should have left it out of the paper. Also, I talk about a issue that should be addressed with the legislation I talked about, but fail to describe what it is because I don’t provide enough evidence about the bill. The sentence states, ” The merit that is found in this bill is overlooked because of the lack of perceptive that Speier is unwilling to talk about and analyze.” It seems like I am on to something but then I just cut it off there, I don’t further go into detail and I leave the reader hanging.

For each evidence, it shows how I make claims, but do not support them to back my thesis. Of course I will have more examples because this isn’t enough to get me the 5 or 6 that Major Garriott is looking for, but that will come with time.

Activity 1: Specifically what is wrong with this thesis doesn’t give any reasoning behind why his theses are always “vague” and “flat”. He just states that they are and says that why they are bad. He has no foundation or reasoning to base the rest of the paper off of. This “thesis” is in fact still vague and flat because it is not taking him anywhere. Plus he tries to throw in extra words to make it sound more fancy like ” the art of the thesis statement” like come on bro there is nothing glorious or beautiful about the thesis because we all dread writing them.

Activity 2:
Honestly, I think whoever graded this paper was being modest because I do not see where this goes along with prompt at all. He is talking more about external influences on his writing and the excuses he made on why his writing is poor. We are supposed to be talking about what we have learned in the class and use the papers as evidence. We don’t care if he got a C,D,F,J .. or whatever letter it he got. He also talks about his inability to take peoples criticism on papers and then how he fixed that. He needs to focus on how he fixed issues with his paper and what he learned in the course to better further his argument in his thesis.

Activity 3:
Paper “3” is a 3 because it neglects the prompt and fails to teach the reader what he learned from the class. Instead he talks about what influenced him outside of the class to try and write better theses. I think he deserves a low 3 or a high 2 since he is not completely careless, but nothing more. I feel like I’m reading a high school paper that wants just a C.

Activity 4:
Well, it doesn’t not teach us anything about what she learned in the class. She instead talks about how she tried to overcome writers block. This is universal to everyone in the worth of writing. Sometimes you just have to take a step back and focus on something else for a bit or ask for help. But she talks about how this effected her ability to write effectively and not about anything that she learned through the class material.It takes the prompt and totally turns a blind eye to it. The reader probably looked at it once and then proceeded to write the paper without giving it much thought.

Final Activity:
These example essays are in some senses far fetched for me as in they kinda seem fake and made up, but I guess some people are just that oblivious to what they are actually writing about. Through these benchmarks I have learned to not look at external things that influence my writing rather try to see what I thought while I was trying to argue my point and how I fixed the issues within my paper. Each activity made me look at different aspects of the papers to see the overall grasp of how the papers were bad and these are the types of papers I need to avoid.

ERH 102 Paper 2-1jfj2ft

ERH 102 Paper 2-1jf2d1r

The highly violent games such a call of duty and battlefield produce high revenue and create more job opportunities for people in the fields of computer science and graphic design. Parents have the option to prevent their kids from playing games that are violent at a young age at their discretion. But ultimately the impact these games have on them as a whole depends on how you raise them in childhood. They are just games and it is up to parents to control the outlets that could influence their children.

While writing my last paper, I started to realize the importance of your credibility in order to back up your evidence. If you do not establish credibility in your paper, it becomes difficult to sway your audience in your direction. At times I struggled to establish my credibility with my audience due to the nature of my topic. It is important to start early on paper’s in order to organize your ideas such as credibility to your topics and evidence.