Amador 1

Samantha Amador
Professor Collins
ENGL 1301
30 November 2016
Senior Year Struggles
This has been my first semester in my senior year of high school and it would not have
been as interesting without Professor Collins. Mrs. Collins has made this semesters English
class more entertaining through challenging assignments and her animated personality. She has
taught me how to broaden my diction and how academic writing will be beneficial in my future
endeavors. Throughout the semester I have learned to communicate through presentations on
academic writing, ratiocination, and by using the constructive reviews given by my peers and
instructors.
When the year began the first essay that Professor Collins assigned did not seem too
difficult but once she went into full detail of her expectations, I knew that this class was going to
challenge my writing abilities more than I anticipated. The majority of my successes in this class
was through the presentations that Mrs. Collins gave on how to write academically. In these
presentations, she taught me that academic writing should never be written in first or second
person, that these essays should never include sentence felonies, that word trash was not
acceptable, and that a broad use of diction is favorable, especially in a 950-1300-word essay.
Each essay that Professor Collins assigned this semester grew in difficulty. The second essay
challenged my ability to remain unbiased and to find two valid sides of a controversial topic
despite my personal opinion on it. The third, and final essay, was to analyze a visualization and
this essay was challenging because there are different interpretations that an individual could

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have on these visuals but I was limited on what I could expand on and I could only use three
sources to support my analyzation. I would have not been able to write any of these essays
without the understanding of what academic writing consists of and without Professor Collins
help.
Professor Collins introduced a brand-new way of revising that I had no idea of until I was
enrolled in her class. Ratiocination helped my formatting and sentence structure tremendously in
all three of my essays. Being able to recognize my mistakes and fix them through this process is
one of the main reasons I succeeded in this class. I found myself editing my papers as I was
writing them because I remembered the rules of ratiocination which include not overusing be
verbs, how to have a variation of sentence length, and how to change the beginning words of
every sentence to avoid repetition in the essay. By the end of all of my ratiocinations my final
drafts looked as if I wrote the essay for the first time because of all the revisions and comments
from my peers and instructors made on them.
The most beneficial part of the whole semester was the aid of my peers and my
instructors. Professor Collins held a workshop for every essay in order for the students to have a
peer reviews. Peer reviews gave me insight in another persons point of view and allowed me to
get ideas to improve my writing without feeling like I was making mistakes but instead
encouraging me to be a better writer. Professor Collins also made it a point to let all of her
students know that she would check the content in each of the essays. As a proficient student, I
would submit my essay to her to get her check on it but then I would also ask Mrs. Pelc, my
second instructor, to review the essay that I ratiocinated on so that I could begin my final draft as
soon as I got both content checks back. This process improved my writing and made me work
harder for my goal in this class.

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This semester has brought an influx of challenges and caused me to question my love for
writing. I have realized that I would have not succeeded in this class without the help and
patience of my instructors and I am extremely grateful for both of them. English has always been
my favorite subject and I am not discouraged, in fact I have become more confident in my
writing abilities.