Mahmoud 1

Othman Mahmoud
Professor Ditch
English 113B
6 May 2015
Reflection Essay
Writing as always been an important part of my life. For me it was always so important
because it is the best way of communication and reaching out to people. A good writer is a wellestablished communicator. But I was never a big fan of writing. I never thought writing English
and learning English would teach me so many things in my life. Writing essay was one of the
things I hated the most. I used to hate it when my teacher used to give me essays to write or if
she used to ask me to participate in writing competitions. I was not good at writing essays. Not
good at all!
Coming from a country like Kuwait where English is not given much preference, I had to
face many problems when it came to writing English essays. I was fluent in Arabic and there
were so many English words that I couldnt understand. Everyone used to talk in Arabic back in
Kuwait and I was good at Arabic because that was what I had learned since I was young. English
was taught too but not to an extent that I could become a professional writer by this age now. I
learned English all throughout my life but I never used it in writing or to communicate with
others. After coming to the United States of America for my undergraduate studies here I had to
take English 113 B as a subject. Initially I thought that this class would turn up to be really hard

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for me because I was not good at English and since English is the national language of this
country I thought that this subject would be extremely difficult for me to learn and pass.
The essays that were given to us increased my knowledge greatly, it made me
understands that a person needs to focus on the point and the opinions that he is trying to tell and
not conclude quickly. Like the first essay that was My Religious Parents made me understand
and at the same time reflect entire family scene with the help of thinking that everything needs to
be in English. It was something that I thought that I was not capable of doing but in the end
managed it. I wrote, Therefore, parents should not force their children to do what they do not
like to do, because if they do so it would make the child lose his own identity. This helped me
develop and analyze the entire essay and how it will be like. At the same time the professor
played an important role by leaving a comment and feedback saying that the quote is well said
and really good sandwich of quotes and analysis. This increased my confidence level.
The second essay that I was given to write was Breaking the Gender Norms, it was
something that I thought as very interesting because we could write so much about it. I did not
know that I could excel. It took me a while because thinking about something is completely
different and actually sitting and analyzing a certain thing is very different. In the essay I learnt
the proper MLA citation. After I attended a workshop in the LRC about the MLA format, I
realized that how important it is to use it. I wrote, On the other hand, Elizabeth McKenna, a
young lady from Guernsey Island, who became a hero for the people in that island because of her
heroic acts she is doing for the Guernsey people during the world war II this shows that I
actually understood the context and could relate it with the prompt thus making it extremely
interesting for me.

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But as the course went on and I attended the class I felt comfortable with time. My
professor was very good at explaining the topics and the techniques and with the period of time I
improved a lot on my writing. There were many difficulties I had to face during the course. I
couldnt pronounce most of the words because there were letters in English which werent in
Arabic. Words having the letter p were most difficult to get used to because there is b in
Arabic and not p. So I used to pronounce them using b. So I had confusion between words
like barking and parking. But my SI professor helped me get over it and learn to pronounce
such words as well.
With the essays that I did in this semester, I learned techniques of writing and the
procedure to write a perfect academic essay. The structure of the essays and how an essay should
be outlined was taught very well by the professor which made the art of writing an essay pretty
easy for me. We have completed three essays in projects, which was very useful for my future.
The dialogue writing and the research analysis made me worked really hard on my writing skills.
I did a great deal of research on various techniques of writing and how an essay should be made
professional. My professor helped me a lot on it and the way the professor taught was very
friendly and very nice which built so much confidence in me. The research analysis, the thesis
statement, the rhetoric analysis, etc. were few of the many things that I learned throughout the
semester. Now Im confident of writing an essay related to these topics without any thought.
From this class I realized that whether we love or hate writing, it doesnt determine our
skill for skilling. Even if I did badly on my essays there was always room for improvement. For
many essays I got a negative feedback from my professor and that helped me learn my mistakes
and I did well on my revision essays. But this is not the end to writing. There is always more to
learn and more to improve when it comes to develop your skills at writing. I still have a lot to

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learn and a lot to improve in my writing outcome. There is no end to putting an extra effort to the
things we do and I believe I would do very well in the next class related to writing and I look
forward on taking the class.