Hoang 1

An Hoang

Professor Rhonda Jackson Joseph

ENGL 1302-GDH3

7 May 2017
Reflective Essay

Throughout the semester, I have experienced a significant improvement on my writing

style as well as a change in my overall work ethic. At the beginning of the year, I had no idea

what to expect for the course ENGL 1302. However, I knew that the course ENGL 1302 was

going to be more complex and advance than ENGL 1301. Before taking this course, I was not as

overly confident about my writing skills as I should be, however, during this semester of going

through a series of preparation for each of the three essays I was required to write, I definitely

have seen a progress in my writing.

I knew for certain that there were some areas where I lacked in. For one thing, I knew

that I was a procrastinator, easily getting distracted and finding excuses for not wanting to write

an essay. As a result of my procrastination, several of my essays would not exactly be the final

product or what I would want it to be. Secondly, I had complications with supporting and

incorporating facts into my essays. For instance, I had trouble finding credibility to back up an

argument. Finally, I was a slow writer in general, not having the ability to quickly apply my

thoughts into words and organizing them in a structure of an essay.

This semester, instead of writing an essay in one spot, doing bits of pieces of an essay has

allowed me to manage my time better and focus more on what I need to do to build up my ideas

in an essay. I have to admit though, that for some of my essays, my writing process was not

smooth. I did get distracted from time to time, but I still reached the word count for all of
 Hoang 2

my essays. Some issues concerning my writing process was that some of my arguments was a

challenge to write about or elaborate on. For example, in my second argument essay, my topic

was on stress management. While writing my rough draft, I had difficulties with expanding on

why stress management was important and how stress can negatively affect health. This issue

had put a toll on me especially when writing about stress was ironically giving me stress. Not

only that, but the final product of my essay would turn out not perfect but rather a hand full of

grammar and mechanic errors. To solve this problem, I couldve done more research on the topic

and spent more time on explaining the topic more thoroughly.

Even so, this course has helped me to become a better writer. I learned how to create a

great thesis statement. I learned how to make an argumentative claim, a rhetorical analysis on a

piece of work, as well as a proposal to a current issue. Moreover, this course has helped me to

plan and quickly organize my thoughts into an essay, therefore allowing me to write at a faster

pace. Furthermore, having another set of eyes to look over my essays has given me a preview on

what I need to edit in order to make my essays better for the next audience. And lastly, I have

learned that writing can be exciting and that in the future, hope to apply my new writing skills to

all my writing works.