Hunter Schmitt

Professor Brown
English 250 PD
10 May 2014
Introductory Reflection
When you go through a course, whether its through work or college or any other
schooling, one needs to take a step back and look at what was learned from the beginning to the
end and how the course has been a benefit. In this essay, I am going to explore the benefits and
the progress in my communication throughout this course. I am going to make mention of the
problems I have had previously that have now been worked on and topics I have been able to
perfect more and some topics that I still need to work on getting better at.
Throughout this communication course, as a class, we worked on several different types
of communication and ways to communicate through visual, oral, electronic, and written. One
issue I have had is how to begin the essay and how to construct a clear and concise thesis. I have
developed the ability to build a thesis that not only captures the readers attention, but also to
give the reader a clear description of what the essay is going to discuss. I also struggle at
developing what ideas to discuss in an essay and what different concepts to explore and for what
purpose. I learned how I personally work with this area of writing. I previously would just wait
until the last minute and not work on a paper, but I learned that I need to first write and then,
after have written the first draft, I can mole over what I have discussed and how I can revise and
reconstruct the essay to fully persuade the argument I am trying to portray. Along with these
struggles, I have also learned ways to improve on concepts that I was fairly good at, but also can
further develop that skill.
One of the areas that I had success in is going into detail and being able to persuade the
reader. I typically did it with the facts though, but as I worked through this course, I learned that
I can be more persuading through rhetorical analysis and evaluate how the author uses facts,
emotions, and credibility to instill his argument into the readers attention. I always would just
focus on the facts and the statistics, but I learned how I can strengthen my persuading essays and
other writing and communication by analyzing how the author uses the readers emotions the use
them to help construct his argument.
Through the evaluation of the techniques both taught and improved on in this course, I
am confident that you understand the ways that my communication course has developed me into
a stronger writer. Through looking at the examples of communication in this portfolio, one will
see how I have improved into becoming a scholarly writer.