Khalid ALajmi

Professor: Corri Ditch

ENGL 113A
November 30, 2015
Reflection Essay
I have no idea about writing an academic essay before taking English
13A class, so it was not easy to me to write an essay especially in the first
time. MlA formatting style, qualifiers, how to write a thesis statement, how to
write an argument essay and how to cite quotes and sources in a proper way.
I did not know how to do all of these things, and thats why I made a lot of
mistakes at first. Even though I still make mistakes, I can say that my writing
has improved a lot in the past 16 weeks.
In the first essay I did not know how to enforce the who, why, what
method. You can see that in my intro. However, the majority of people do
not know this and even the few who know the difference they tend to think
that it does not really matter because they believe that gender just like sex
is something natural. This is a quote from my introduction and as I said you
can see here that I didnt answer the What question, the reader will not
know what I mean by something natural. However, in my second essay I
manage to avoid this mistake. Not many people today know that gender is
not determined biologically, but it is the appropriate behaviors that socially
assigned to each sex while sex refers to the biological distinction between
men and women. This is a quote from my second essay introduction, and

you can see that I answered the What question by explaining why gender
not determined biologically. In addition, in the first essay I used word like
standard, expectation, natural and act. These words are too general, I
supposed to use a specific words that I learned in class, such as: norms,
socially constructed and masculine or feminine performances. I correct the
mistakes I did in essay 1 by using these words in my second essay, and here
is a quote that shows that. Therefore, masculine and Feminine
Performances are controlled by the advertisement norms. In other words, the
masculine and feminine performances are socially constructed and
advertisement plays an important role in shaped these performances that
people preform today.
I did not know about the qualifier words, so I did not use it, and thats
was also one of the mistake I did in the first essay. For example, Most
people think that sex and gender are the same thing. This was the first
sentence in my first essay, also on page 2 I repeated the same mistake.
Boys in most societies are expected to like sports and toys such as cars and
wrestlers while girls must play with toys such as fashion dolls and
dollhouse. If you compare these sentences to these sentences which is in
my second essay. The mass media today has access to almost everything,
including people life. And Masculinity and femininity are the two attributes
that we often use to identify a persons gender. You will see that I avoid the
mistake I did by writing Almost and Often in the second essay.
MlA style and format are one the things that I made mistakes in. For
instance, in my first essay I didnt know how to write the quote probably. For

the individual, gender construction starts with assignment to a sex category

on the basis of what the genitalia look like at birth. (Lorber 20), .You can see
that I put a period inside the quotation mark and a comma after the
parentheses which is something wrong. However, in the second essay I wrote
the quote without any mistake as you can see in the following example.
Individuals are born sexed but not gendered, and they have to be taught to
be masculine or feminine (Lorber 24). Another thing that I made mistake in
was the lack of the text support, I wrote a whole paragraph on page 4 of my
first essay without using any text support or evidence. However, in my
second essay I used evidence, text support and paraphrase in all of my body
paragraphs. In addition, there are some things that I did wrong in both
essays. One of these things is citation. In essay one I didnt cite the articles, I
only cite the book, and in the essay 2 I did cite the articles, but I forgot to do
the hanging indent.
One of the important thing that I learned in this semester is how to
analysis an article rhetorically and how I can use it to support my claim. I use
the analytical method in both of my essays. In the first essay I only use
quotes from the articles, but in the second essay I learned how to paraphrase
an article as you can see in the next example. [Jean Kilbourne in her article
Still Killing Us Softly: Advertising and the Obsession with Thinness.] Talked
about how these false images affect women in verity ways. Kilbourne said
that the ideal body that media advertise is unattainable and even if women
starve themselves only 5% of them will reach the ideal body. This is one of
the article that I use in my second essay to support my argument.

Writing a conclusion was another thing that I found challenging, in my

first essay my conclusion was like another body paragraph because I talked
on it about new idea. However, after I went to the LRC I knew that the goal
from the conclusion is to sum up everything I wrote, not to introduce a new
idea. In addition, I should use it to summarize the main claims of my essay,
which is something I did in my second essay.
Even though I still made some mistakes in grammar, organization,
style, and format my writing has improved a lot during this semester, there is
no doubt about that. I will keep the hard work and develop the things I
learned to make my writing much more batter