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Troy Faust
Mrs. Stegner
ERWC Period 0
24 May 2016
A Semester To Remember
For my reflection letter I have chosen The Good Food/Bad Food Proposal, The
Research Essay, the Multi-Genre Portfolio Essay as well as essay drafts, annotating
articles, and evidence charts. From this work, I will reflect on what I have learned about
the skills I have developed about reading a text, annotating a text, creating a Works Cited
page, draft editing and submitting papers to Turnitin.com. I will also reflect on my
strengths using parenthetical citations and MLA formatting and my weaknesses using
commentary and style in writing. I will address my academic essays and the skills that I
have learned, such as formatting an essay with little to no flaws and finding textual
evidence to support a claim I made. Upon reflection, I believe I need additional
improvement in the areas of commentary and writing style. Finally, I have set goals to
enhance my writing ability to allow my commentary to flow more efficiently within my
textual evidence.
The three essays I wrote in my first and second semester that I included in this
reflection were The Good Food/Bad Food Proposal, The Research Essay, and the MultiGenre Portfolio Essay. The Good Food/Bad Food Proposal I wrote exemplified a research
paper that focused on school lunches and their inability to satisfy the basic needs to a
student's health. The essay required us to provide a counterarguments and disprove them
with textual evidence as to why school lunches are a bad alternative to a healthy lifestyle.

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Counterarguments like the cost of school lunches allows for more investment on other
school functions like textbooks, computers for the library, etc. (Faust) were disproved by
the facts regarding the Health, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2012 and how it demanded
meals must be lower in fat, calories and sodium and contain lean proteins, more fruits and
vegetables and whole grains (Faust). The Research Essay I wrote targeted the topic of
Bullying, specifically the topic of Cyberbullying. In the essay there were times when I
cited textual evidence from scholarly articles to provide the argument that cyberbullying
has grown faster than any other form of bullying since the introduction of the internet in
the late 90s. Evidence used from college case studies resulted in the idea that
cyberbullying was often overlooked as a natural part of childhood (Faust). With that
said, it was made clear to me, while writing the essay, that cyberbullying has become
increasingly anonymous with the constant upgrades to internet accessibility and the
introduction of more social networking sites, parents have trouble noticing their child's
struggles with cyberbullying unless the child openly admits theyre being cyberbullied.
Lastly, the Multi-Genre Essay I wrote most recently related more to the types of texts we
read as a society based on gender, age, socio-economic conditions, and other forms of
traits we live with. The idea of the essay was to read a list of 300 topics, pick 20 that
seemed most interesting to write about, then narrow those 20 down to a top 4. From those
top 4, I picked what I found to be the most interesting topic of the 4 I selected. I chose to
write about the topic, Are We Too Distracted By Technology? for the reason that it
applied to much of not only what I experienced first hand, but also watching other
students endure the same problems I have with technological access in the classroom or
at home. My topic was centered mostly on classroom distraction. For example, the use of

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Chromebooks on the classroom setting served as a perfect fit for my argument that we are
too distracted by technology as students avoided class instruction to play games on the
Chromebooks and disregard seemingly valuable information in accordance to future work
in the course of English (Faust).
For my prep work that guided me in the right direction when writing essays this
year in ERWC, I chose essay drafts, annotating articles, and evidence charts. First and
foremost, the essay drafts assisted me the most with improving on my writing skills with
each essay I wrote. The essay draft that helped me significantly were the Literary
Analysis essays because I initially had trouble integrating quotes and providing
meaningful commentary, however after the Into The Wild essay first semester, I was able
to apply the skills I learned from the grade I received on that essay, to the Brave New
World essay in second semester. Annotating articles allowed me to expand my
vocabulary while writing, given the Scholarly articles I read containing seemingly high
level language and grammar in which I became more comfortable with using bigger
words to add to an already meaningful sentence, or other parenthetical citations. For my
prep work, the last piece of work that best provided me with assistance to my essays were
the evidence charts we completed. For the Brave New World Essay, the evidence charts
helped me significantly because it allowed for me to prepare my commentary as well for
a smooth flow in writing style for the essay. Organization was key when using the
evidence charts, if I did not spend the extra time making them or ordering the quotes used
chronologically, I would have had much more trouble writing a seemingly adequate
literary analysis essay.

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A few skills I have learned to better myself as a writer include reading a text,
annotating a text, creating a Works Cited page, draft editing and submitting of papers to
Turnitin.com. I have learned over the course of ERWC how to effectively read a text.
With this skill I can analyze almost any given text and pick out its main idea of a text and
pull pieces from it to support a claim I might make about about that same text. For
example, in my cyberbullying research essay, I had to read multiple articles to support my
opinion that cyberbullying is developing fast and without proper attention, we may have
an epidemic of childrens lack of confidence, depression, or any other forms of effects
that result from cyberbullying. Another skill I learned that I will take with me in my
endeavours in writing is annotating articles. Annotating articles for me gave me a visual
representation as to what was important when looking for evidence to cite to later add
into the form of an essay. Using Kami and Scrible really helped me with my Multi-Genre
Portfolio essay due to their easy accessibility and easy-to-use interface made it a fun and
easy way to annotate online articles without having to print them to be thrown out at a
later date. Creating a Works Cited page helped not only my teacher grade my papers, but
also other students who peer graded navigate through my essay in order to know where I
was pulling my information. In addition it also aided me in making sure my sources were
credible and appropriate to use while writing my essays, because I would have all my
sources in front of me and if I needed to, reference them one last time before submitting
them to my teacher or Turnitin.com. Leading into the use of Turnitin.com, this website
helped me by keeping my work original and allowed me to prove to myself that I am
capable of writing essays with ease and very minor flaws. Lastly, draft editing really
guided me in the right direction as I was able to change my style of writing and also fix

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basic mistakes that are overlooked when self editing due to some bias in writing skill that
would have cost me a letter grade in some situations.
Arguably my two biggest strengths when it comes to writing are parenthetical
citations and MLA formatting. I can cite evidence from any text with ease and provide for
a solid stand on a claim I will make early on into the essay. Another strength I can
accompany to an essay is my ability to format in MLA flawlessly. I think the ability to
present a paper a paper with proper and seemingly neat formatting will account for a well
formulated essay as well. In contrast, however, I do have some weaknesses when it
comes to writing: commentary and style. My commentary appeals and makes sense to
me, but time after time I found myself reading a graded essay with remarks to the
commentary in it that it was too wordy and not to the point. I feel like a way to improve
upon an easy skill like this is to organize my textual evidence and support first, then file
my commentary to help convey the message of my evidence chosen in a clearer way. My
style is meaningful however, it can be too subjective and too focused on any one topic
and does not give as much attention to other topics. One way to address the problem is to
focus my attention equally on all subjects of a topic and avoid bias when writing.
After completing multiple essays in Mrs. Stegners ERWC Course this year, I can
now successfully format any essay in an MLA style. Since learning how to effectively
format each essay, it has become habitual that I always start with format when beginning
an essay. I have yet to lose points on any essay in the means of formatting because of my
dedication to ensuring a clean, well-formatted and appropriate paper. I no longer second
guess my ability to format an essay in MLA as my grades regarding formatting reflect.
In conclusion, I have learned a number of things a college level writing course expects
out of a student given this class was a CSU sponsored class in a way the course was

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planned. I have learned how to format flawlessly and retain my own original work and its
invaluability compared to plagiarized text. Leading into other classes, my papers were
well organized and were 99% original with the exception of some research evidence used
in my Economics class when reflecting on a project and its importance to me. I am
convinced after taking ERWC this year as a senior, I am more inclined to improve my
writing skills when given the chance and I also feel very prepared for my first college
English/Writing course due to the college level exposure of grading and teaching I
received from Mrs. Stegner. The demands of my future professors will not put me into
shock should writing become a large portion of an assignment in college. I am grateful
for the opportunity to have taken part in this class and wish to build on my already wide
range of knowledge in writing I learned in high school, in college.