English 101 Reflective Essay

Throughout each experience in your life, you are expected to walk away with something; whether it be a new way of thinking, learned techniques or a mixture of the both. Throughout English 101, I ended up learning much more than expected. This was due to having a great teacher, but also the realization of how little high school actually prepared me for college English. The class itself took me on a journey of learning, not only acquiring new skills, but uncovering an unknown side of me as a writer; which then led to a change in my writing process and a solid achievable set of goals for the future. In this essay, I will be covering how ENG101 helped me advance my way of writing; as well as how it has affected me and what that means for my

Just from learning how to focus my main point, punctuate everything and organize my essay, everything came together nicely. Throughout all of these essays I realized when revising, your best tool is peer editing. It’s one thing to look through your own essay and revise it; normally you will miss a thing or two, getting a pair of fresh eyes is beneficial and they tend to catch things you wouldn’t have. I had a great experience with the peer edit on my narrative; “Metaphors were properly used at the perfect times within the story, only thing I felt needed more attention was the run-on sentences” (Joshua Alvarado). Not only was his suggestion helpful, but he also made sure to give me positive feedback. Although, if I had to choose one of the most valuable things I had learned in this class, besides punctuation of course, it would have to be rhetorical strategies. I feel quite silly that I hadn’t known them, but now that I do my writing has improved substantially. Having a belt full of tools to convince or lead your reader to the main point is essential and that is exactly what rhetorical strategies did for me. Each essay has helped me gain

Prior to this class, I had the impression that when you developed a solid writing process that was what you stuck with and continually used; I was incredibly wrong, you never stop learning, so in turn how you write is ever changing too. In high school, my writing process was a rule set guide without much creativity. Using the five paragraph rule is useless and doesn’t make for a unique essay. Now I write as many paragraph’s as it takes to get my point across. My writing process was a mirror image of a high school textbook definition; obviously that didn’t work for my first essay, as it was a failure. After taking Eng101, I feel like I’ve developed one of my own; a writing process that has the ability to adapt to whatever genre necessary and allow me to get a polished final product. Brainstorming has become a key to my success; I gather enough ideas to give me solid content, then when I start the rough draft everything just flows out. Introduction and conclusion had been an ugly area, I can assume that is due to my lack of focus. Dr. Chardon, my instructor, guided me into focusing my thoughts in a way that flowed, “You just sometimes need to phrase things a little differently so that the focus is on the text” (Dr. Chardon). One of her best pieces of advice, was to make sure you use the last sentence in a paragraph to bring your focus full circle,