Reflection Essay

Reflection Essay This first semester of English was merely a learning experience for me. As I reviewed my previous essays from English 101 this semester, I chose to critique my visual analysis. The visual analysis was written to evaluate a PowerPoint that I created about my career choice. In this essay, I am going to elaborate on my experience of writing my first college essay and the importance of receiving feedback from my peers regarding my papers. Also, I am going to reflect back on what I’ve learned about my writing style and how I plan to use it to challenge myself in the future by referring back to my visual analysis. I have concluded that there are still many things that I need to work on, but as the semester progressed there have been signs of improvement. When the semester first started, I had some exposure to writing essays on a college level from taking Advanced English in high school. The purpose of the class was to prepare students for English 101, but after receiving the results from my first college essay, the class appeared as a waste of time. My English class in high school was a piece of cake compared to my English 101 class. When my teacher gave us our results back, the first thing I noticed was her comment about plagiarism and at that point I immediately started to panic. All of my high school teachers use to talk about plagiarism and how it wasn’t tolerated in college. I was under the impression that if a student was caught plagiarizing in college, then they were immediately dismissed from the university, but my teacher gave us a little leeway since it was our first paper. By my teacher giving me leeway on my first paper it allowed me to learn from my mistakes, whereas she could have failed me and not have given me the opportunity to better my writing. One of the most beneficial things that I learned from this semester of English was that having your peers read over your rough draft can help the outcome of your paper. Having a second and third pair of eyes to review your paper decreases the errors in the paper to a minimum. For example, when I allowed my peers to review a copy of my paper they were able to find things I fail to see while I was reviewing my paper. Peer reviews can also be a learning situation too. Your peers might be more knowledgeable about a subject than you are. One thing that I’ve learned from analyzing my writing is that I have struggled with elaborating on my topics. Although my ideas and examples would remain on topic, it seemed as if I was unclear about what I was trying to say. For example, in my visual analysis essay, there was a paragraph regarding the effectiveness of the relationship built between the author and the audience of the PowerPoint. The entire paragraph seemed to flow together until the final sentence where I mentioned the “informal text.” That was my first time referring to that topic, so the readers had little understanding of what that might have meant. Informal text was a major point in the essay. Therefore, it should have been placed at the beginning of the paragraph along with supporting details. This way the readers would have had a better understanding of the paragraph and how informal text contributes to the essay. Another thing that I learned over the course of the semester and from revising my paper is that I wasn’t quoting some of the content of the essay incorrectly. Even though the content consisted of facts from online sources, the sentences should still be cited or put in quotations. For example, in paragraph five of my visual analysis, I stated that “UAB Hospital is an academic medical center located in the Medical Center District of Birmingham on the University of Alabama at Birmingham campus.” This was good factual information provided to support the topic of the paragraph, but without quotations this is considered as plagiarism. At the beginning of the semester, I was under the impression that only direct words from the author should be put in quotations. As the semester progressed I have learned that this is not the only time quotations should be used. I now understand when to include quotations and how to properly cite direct quotes or sources. By learning how to properly cite my sources, it has made incorporating quotes in my writing a lot easier. After all of the material that I’ve come in contact with this semester, whether positive or negative, can be used in the future to help better my writing skills. In my future papers, I plan to use the negative feedback to improve the errors that have been brought to my attention, such as plagiarism and elaborating on my topics. These are factors that are easily corrected and deciding factors between a mediocre paper and an excellent paper. Now that I have learned what it takes to have a successful paper, I can accelerate my writing skills to a higher level. In conclusion, this semester has taught me a lot about the way I write. I have progressed from the time I entered college up until now. Upon entering college I thought that I knew all that I needed to know in order to write a college level paper. I quickly learned that I made several mistakes that I did not notice before I came to college. I took the information that I learn from getting the results back from my first paper to correct my errors and ensure that I did not repeat the same mistakes in my next essay. Now that I have the knowledge that I need to write on a higher level, it will ensure that I perform well on the rest of my essays throughout my college career.