Acosta Pierantoni 1

Valeria Acosta Pierantoni

Professor Collins

ENGL 1301

4 May 2017

Reflective Essay

For the spring semester, I was taught by Professor Collins in the English 1301 class.

During this semester, I did not know what to expect from this class because it is my first

semester. I learned a variety of new things that will be helpful through the semesters that are to

come and I thank Professor Collins for that. Even though I struggle with writing my writing

skills have improved by practicing the writing and following the steps on how to write a paper.

This semester I learned ratiocination and peer editing through essay one and essay two.

Ratiocination is a very useful tool to edit a paper. On essay one I used ratiocination and it

helped me with most of the errors, repetition of words at the beginning of sentences, the be

verbs, pronouns, and dead words. By using this tool my writing skills have improved and it

showed me how to improve a paper. The steps of using ratiocination: step one circle the be

verbs except the ones inside quotes and have as least be verbs as possible, step two draw a box

on the first word of every sentence and make sure there are no constant repetitions, step three

highlight every other sentence and determine if they are short, medium, long, then combine short

sentences if needed to and shorten long sentences if they are more than two lines long, step four

find dead words and cross them out or replace them with a synonym, step five put a triangle

around all the pronouns. The five steps of ratiocination are useful when editing a paper.
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Peer editing is great for a paper feedback. Peers can help by pointing out grammatical

mistakes and sentence suggestions. This helped me because when I would misspell a word or had

other grammatical errors my peers would point it out to me. Also, they would suggest a reword

of a sentence if it did not make sense on what I was trying to say. On my papers, I tried to have

more than two peer editings because I wanted to have the least amounts of mistakes possible and

some peers caught errors that others did not. In the learning lab, the writing tutors were helpful

because not only they guided me on how to write my paper but also did peer editing and gave me

feedback and suggestions on how I could improve my writing. Peer editing is a useful resource

on editing and improving a paper.

Having learned these methods in class will help me in the future by improving my

writing and have a clearer way to organize a paper. Ratiocination is something that I learned and

I know it will help me on my future papers. Peer editing help me have feedback on what my

errors were and what I needed to change from my writing. These tools among others will be

useful in future for the papers that I will have write and help edit other classmates papers.