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Victoria De La Torre

Professor Beadle

English 115

7 December, 2019

Reflection

This year I grew my skills as a writer I have gotten better in many aspects of my writing.

I remember my classes high school I constantly got B’s in my essays but now I have gotten A’s

in the class which shows me that I have improved. The first essay I turned in I felt really scared

because I had thought it was really bad but then I turned out to get an A. I felt relieved and

excited to start writing. It started with the Space Project where we had to compare three articles

to each other to see which author had the best strategy of ethos, pathos, and logos. After we had

discussed all three articles in class I came to the conclusion that Sonja Lyubomirsky’s argument

was the best. Therefore I used her article as the base for my argument and then attacked the flaws

of the other arguments by comparing Lyubomirsky’s arguments strengths vs. the others

weaknesses. I got a 96% on my essay however I feel like I rushed it too much and that if I had

proofread it one more time before I had turned in I would have had fewer grammar mistakes than

I had. Also I had a couple of flaws in some areas in the essay where I was lacking the necessary

analyzation per quote. Also in the first draft of the essay I had not included any direct quotes and

did mostly paraphrasing for the entirety of the essay. Therefore in the final essay draft that I

made sure to quote my paraphrasing and add direct quotes from the articles to prove my point. It

did help make my argument stronger and better. I also learned how to quote and cite my quotes

properly. I also believe that the visit to the LRC helped me better the structure of the essay.
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When I went the tutor helped me realize that some of the sentences and arguments did not make

sense. For example, I was arguing a valid point in one paragraph but had not mentioned it in the

topic sentence of the paragraph so it seemed to random to be in the paragraph. The tutor made

me realize that I have a problem when I write that I tend to get off topic easily. Although what I

am saying has a valid point it does not fit well in the paragraph I need to focus more on my

structure. Even though I went to the LRC and the tutor caught most of my mistakes like this

there is one we missed in the front page of my first essay. Also my format was wrong I forgot to

mark the top with page numbers with my last name attached to them. However the organization

of my essay and the grammar mistakes were still factors in my essay that I need to fix and

develop in my essays.

In the second essay Project Text I think I did a little bit better in catching my formatting

mistakes even though there were still a couple of them. I also got a 96% on this essay. My

grammar did improve a little bit but not enough to get me out of the 9 range on the rubric. I gave

the second essay more rounds proofreading as I was suggested in the first essay to better the

problem in the second essay. the Something that I also improved on the second essay is having a

better title. This time my title helped my readers know what I was talking about. Style is another

problem that I had with both essays I lacked the flow between words and sentences. It wasn’t to

big of a problem because I ended up getting a 9 on both essays under this category. For both

essays I found it hard for me to meet the essay page requirement as you can tell from my drafts

that I turned in compared to the finish products of both of my essays. Therefore, I have improved

in learning how to do direct quote, cite paraphrasing, stay on topic, do MLA formatting, meeting

the page requirement and styling my structure of my essay. In all, I can say that I have grown as
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a writer from this class and feel that I am prepared for college level writing assignments. I

believe that these assignments were unique and at the end I felt quite accomplished to have

written them.