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Joseph Arroyo
Professor Adler
STACC English 1A #32474
4 May 2016
The Journey of College Level English
At the beginning of the course English 1A it seemed a bit intimidating because it is
college level English, but along the way I, myself was able to learn and manage new ways to
improve my reading, writing and learning skills in one course. In previous courses, I picked up a
bad habit which was just reading literature in a casual way, and as a result, this would only let me
absorb minimal information. However, as I started this college-level English course I realized
that I should not continue with this and changed my ways for reading first. As a newly developed
college writer, I pay close attention to the text, annotate, summarize, and underline important
quotes and unknown words. In addition, throughout this course, I learned how to formally
analyze texts and poetry. In order for me to analyze literature, I must use the strategies I
previously mentioned. Now that I learned how to improve my understanding of English literature
by practicing these strategies, I can now use this knowledge to prepare and create outlines for my
essay writing for future courses. Overall, my attitude towards English had evolved from neutral
to great in just this course alone.
Throughout this spring semester of college level English, as a cohort, we wrote a few
different essays from analyzing poetry to analyzing career paths. In fact, the essay I am proudest
of which is also the most recent was a discourse community ethnography. This ethnography
revealed the discourse and materials one specific community must use in order to be successful
in their practice. Moreover, I am most proud of this assignment because I have spent more time

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and effort on this than usual. This was a very interesting and beneficial assignment to better
understand a career path we plan to take in the future, therefore, this further increased my
motivation to write a good paper. To be more specific, I am proud of the research process
completed while working on this essay, in addition to actually writing the paper there were much
effort and organization completed in the first stage of my writing process. First, I created an
outline and retrieved research to incorporate into the ethnography. Then, I gathered all the
information and had the assignment in front of me as I started to write. After two drafts and
multiple peer-reviews, I was finally able to complete this assignment and turn it in confidently.
At first, if I am being honest, I had not yet really researched or know the basic
qualifications and/or requirements needed for the career path I had in mind. However, I knew for
a fact that I needed to know these things before I decided to enter the field. Therefore, this
assignment was all for what I needed to know to join a discourse community I declared as nurse
practitioners in the ethnography. The reason why I chose to write how nurse practitioners are a
specific discourse community is because that is my future career path, I would like to see myself
as a nurse practitioner. This assignment was a great opportunity to fully understand the practice
and routine of a nurse; therefore, I am very confident to choose to nurse as a career path.
Nevertheless, in this course, there was one essay in particular that was not my best
writing; because I struggled quite a bit writing this essay. This assignment was a literary analysis
of Jimmy Santiago-Bacas Singing at the Gates, a collection of poems. Since I was not the best in
analyzing poetry at the time, I was quite discouraged at first but then the more I read and thought
about the text I started to generate ideas and connections. Another small struggle was trying to
gather my thoughts and analysis, it took a while, but then I did it thanks to my classmate. In
English 1A, I learned how to analyze more efficiently and passed the struggles of this paper by

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asking one of my classmates for help while we peer reviewed each others papers. Meanwhile,
my classmate was editing my paper I would ask how she would analyze poetry so I would be
able to get at least a different idea. At the time, this was all I needed to get started on my paper.
Next, I then organized my ideas as a whole and wrote the entire literary analysis.
From what I observed throughout this English course, there are a few things that I, myself
must practice before enrolling into an upper division course. For instance, the MLA format and
sentence structure. This is one small grammatical error that I still struggle with at present. The
part of the MLA format that I struggle with is at the most, are the citations of books, articles, and
studies. Other than those components of the publication format, I understand and practice them
when there must be intergraded sources. Now, with the sentence structure, I have a tendency to
write many comma-splice sentences and even complex and compound sentence at the college
level. This is something I really must work on if I would like to further continue my education
towards a degree. Although, these are minor errors I feel that I can break his bad habit and start
to write correctly by the next English course.
Finally, as a current college student and possibly a grad student, I intend to become a
better writer at the level I should be. As of now, I am trying my best in the current English course
I am enrolled in. However, I am determined to become a better writer not only for school but for
everyday life. English is an essential in everyday life and career, it is our dominant language in
which we use every day. Some professionally, but in others not so professional. Despite that, it is
still the way we'll all communicate. In college, the reason why we take English courses is too
critical think because we need that in every profession from nursing to engineers, from teachers
to writers. Therefore, I am very determined to strengthen my reading and skills throughout my
schooling by advanced English courses. Not only will this benefit me, but society as well.

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