Brian Clune

Professor Barnes

EN 102

4/26/20

Reflection Essay for ePortfolio

Now that I have finished all of the major assignments for this class it is appropriate for

me to go and look back on the work that I have done throughout the semester and how my

writing changed. First off, the exploratory essay. I felt that the original version of this paper was

a little bland so when I went back to revise it, I added a little bit more of my own personal voice

to it. The paper was merely an initial examination of our research topic, so I felt that it was

appropriate to be more personal and informal compared to a more traditional research paper.

The next assignment was the annotated bibliography, which the writing center helped me out

with a lot. Before I went to the writing center the annotations that I wrote for my sources were

more like summaries rather than explaining how the source helped add to my research. There

were also grammatical errors that I fixed as well. Finally, there was the research paper which I

revised make it more organized and have my ideas flow better. I also had some smaller errors

relating to the citing of sources within my paper that I also fixed.

We live in a world that is very connected and therefore interact with many forms of

media every day, and therefore it is important to understand and know how to use these media

types. By being able create and improve upon my own website is a valuable skill to have in this

digital age. It shows that I am able to use technology to compile my work and create a message

to be shared with others. On the website I have all of my papers as well as images
accompanying them for people to read and learn new information from. Web design is also a

great skill to have nowadays because a lot of business and communication utilizes the internet.

After taking this class I feel much more competent when it comes to writing a research

paper. Learning how to use scout definitely helped me find scholarly sources and I will definitely

take advantage of that resource for future endeavors. I also learned more about what makes a

good source for a research paper. Obviously with so much information at our fingertips when

we go online, it can be overwhelming, often there may be so much on a certain topic that it

would impossible to read through everything. Being able to narrow down and pick out

individual sources from this huge pool of information is an important skill to learn and I

definitely felt like I learned how to do this better after taking this class. Eliminating sources

based on date, format, outlet, subject, and other things are useful tools to make picking a

source easier. I learned how to make an annotated bibliography the correct way which

definitely helped me with me research paper towards the end because I was able to not only

compile the sources I had, but I was also able to look back on the annotations I did and get a

quick explanation of what that source covered and why I used it in the first place, which

definitely made writing a longer research paper easier. On a similar note, I also learned how

much work goes into writing one of these lengthy research paper and how much time it can

take. Because the paper was the cumulative project for the course, I learned how to budget my

time and split up the work that went towards writing it so that when it came to finishing it I

wasn’t too stressed about it because of all of the work I had done prior. I’m definitely the type

of person who just goes and bangs out a paper a night or two before the due date so to have
everything more or less in place for me by the time I was writing was a welcome departure

from my usual strategy.

As a whole this class helped me not only as a writer, but it helped me personally in

some ways as well. There aren’t really any classes that start out by asking you to take inventory

of your own well-being so when class started to really get underway, I found that I was asking

myself questions about things that make me happy. I got to research something that I enjoy

and something that I feel others can benefit from too. I liked the structure of the class because

it allowed me to have a more relaxed Friday that I was able to take advantage of and do things

that I enjoyed.