Hannah Sullivan

Mrs. Litle

English 121

April 21 2017

Reflection of English 121

Believe it or not I have improved my writing skills in this semester of English 121. As a

class we have typed a total of four papers and they have all been different types of writing styles.

Not only have we learned by typing these papers, we have learned how to do different thesiss;

weve learned how to properly site MLA, and a lot about communication through Bazermans

views. Overall this class has brought me a lot more knowledge on the English subject as a whole

and I have really enjoyed this semesters class.

We started this semester off with paper #1 which happened to be our narrative writing

piece. I wrote a narrative story that was very long but it was off topic and I had to redo the entire

paper. I learned that the narrative writing piece is supposed to be a story about a life lesson or

gained piece of knowledge through experience. Since I couldnt get graded for the narrative

story, I re-did one about the golden rule and how that has always applied to my life and

experiences that Ive learned from even throughout middle school. After re-turning in paper #1 I

scored an 82% and got back constructive criticism on how to improve my narrative for next time.

On this paper, I learned what a comma splice was and corrected it in my future writings. The

major lesson learned on this paper was to emphasize on my topic and talk about the significance

throughout the entire paper to keep the reader engaged.

 Paper #2 was my favorite concept to write about, however, it was also the paper I had a

harder time with. This paper we had to choose an advertisement to talk about and explain the

message that its conveying while using rhetorical devices. This paper will benefit me

tremendously in the future because I learned how to use ethos, logos, and pathos better than I did

when taught it in high school. Rhetorical devices are a huge part of writing because they make

the readers feel engaged through emotion, logistics, and credibility. This is important to add in

every single paper I write in the future.

I struggled the most with paper #3. We had to read an article written by Charles

Bazerman and respond to it. Bazerman writes in a very sophisticated language that is difficult to

comprehend at times. I learned about social facts, genre systems, and how the world

communicates through language. I chose to revise this essay as my one option because I did very

badly at the responding part and only did the summarizing part of the paper. I learned that I need

to move on in the future by combining paragraphs of the same topic together and thoroughly

revising my papers before submitting them to make sure they are my best piece of work.

The last paper of the semester was paper #4; this paper was an argumentative essay. I

wrote about how schools should start later in the day to allow teenagers a better lifestyle. I

learned to always have a rebuttal statement because when writing an argumentative piece you

dont want to seem very pushy about your point. Its important that you state the other persons

point and they will be more willing to listen to yours. Facts are very much needed throughout

this paper and also citing my sources which I did in my annotated bibliography which is my next

lesson learned.
 The annotated bibliography brought me a lot of knowledge on MLA formatting. Ive

learned how to properly use the authors name during in text citations and quotes. Throughout this

paper, we also learned how to use the schools database through our guest speaker. I now know

how to find liable sources to use and figure out how they are liable while researching specific

topics. I learned multiple websites to use to help when citing in MLA.

Overall, this semester has been very beneficial towards me and my writing style in the

near future. I learned a ton of different techniques in the duration of each papers section and

assignments. Ill always include the significance when writing a narrative story and make sure

that Im going back to it throughout my entire paper. Ive learned what a comma splice is as well

which will help improve my grammar tremendously. Rhetorical devices will often be used by me

when writing papers in the future to make the reader engaged through emotion, logics, and

credibility. I will always include a rebuttal when writing argumentative papers to make the reader

feel more comfortable and not as attacked and continue using the schools research database

while Im here at OJC. English 121 has taught me a lot of good writing tactics and grammar

rules by writing each different type of paper. Im a firm believer in learning through experience

and that happens to be what I did this semester.