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Raul Cruz

Professor Moore

ENGL 1301

2 May 2019

Reflective Essay

After many weeks into my second semester at Alvin Community College, I can say that

many of the courses I have taken so far have greatly improved me as a student, but one of the

courses that I feel has had a major impact on me is English 1301. This course has helped me with

meeting deadlines, communication, and something that is very important in higher education and

in many careers, writing. Before taking this course, I was skeptical on how I would perform. I

felt I would struggle since I had not taken an English course since high school. Although I

performed well in previous courses, I was nervous and overwhelmed since I was unaware of how

a college English course would function. As time went by, I learned that my writing skills

weren’t as bad as I initially thought, but there were areas where I needed improvement. For the

most part I haven’t struggled with grammar or punctuations, but as we got deeper into the course,

I learned that writing goes beyond grammatical errors. Learning how to properly integrate

citations and have a specific tone in an essay has immensely helped me in English 1301 and

other courses.

Looking back at my high school years, I cannot recall receiving an in-depth lesson on

citing papers. Although I do remember covering it briefly and citing numerous papers, it wasn’t

until college that I learned the proper way to cite. Before English 1301, I was familiar with

having a works cited page at the end of every essay that required outside sources, but upon

writing my first paper in this course, I struggled with implementing citations into the essay itself.
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If I looks back at my review essay draft, a lot of the errors I made were due to improper citations.

For example, in my review essay on Law Enforcement, I cited the Houston Police Department

Academy website as follows, “In this agency, cadets do not live in the academy so they must

commute to the training facilities from Monday through Friday. (HPD-Academy)”. As you can

see at the end of the sentence, I added a period before the citation. I learned by the feedback on

my draft that the period must go after the citation, not before. Fortunately, I was corrected during

the conference and would avoid this mistake on this paper and future one as well.

Properly implementing the desired tone in your essay is crucial in order to successfully

communicate to your audience. Every major essay we wrote had a different way of approaching

it. The review essay was meant to inform the audience on a specific career. The visual rhetorical

analysis made the author think critically on a visual and dissect it to inform the audience. Last

but not least, the review essay made the author report on a controversial topic and communicate

it to the audience without being bias. In my opinion, the report essay was the most difficult from

the bunch. Although I dived into this essay confident that I would be unbiased, by the time I saw

both sides of the issue, I had already chosen a side. Due to this, I had a hard time writing the

essay. I had to reread each paragraph to make sure I wasn’t being bias. Since I worked hard to

avoid this, I did not have any problems during my conference or with peer reviews.

As we come upon the final week of this semester, I can say that my writing has greatly

improved with the help of my professor and my fellow classmates. Although it wasn’t easy at

times, I got through it. I believe that all the new skills and techniques I acquired will help me in

future courses and in my career.