English 102 Reflective Essay

English 102 (Writing and Research about Culture) had a main purpose of teaching students how to write research papers. This course also taught how different perspectives and prejudices are based on the language that it uses. Examples of these prejudices included: sexism, ageism, ableism, heterosexism/homophobia, and racism. Since English 102 is a class that focuses on writing, one of the major lessons included learning how to write a proper essay. For example, I learned that the basic outline of an essay included: the intro, body, and conclusion. The parts of the essay then further breaks down into the basic parts of a paragraph. The basic parts of a paragraph include: a transition sentence, a topic sentence, supporting sentences, and a concluding sentence. In this class, I also

Another concept that was taught in this class was how to do research and write a paper to coincide with it. For every paper that was written in this class, students were instructed to write an annotated bibliography. The bibliography was used to help students plan their research by finding sources, picking out the most important points in the source, and figuring out how students were going to incorporate the source into their own writing. One skill that was used to help complete this assignment was finding credible sources. In this class, it was taught that google was not a reliable source to use due to majority of the sources not being credible. I was taught to use sources that could be found on the University’s Library website, which included databases (such as EBSCO), or the catalog (to find books). For online resources, I was taught to use Google News (only if the news came from major news sources, such as the New York Times), Google Scholar, and Google