Jewel Jorgensen

Mrs. Di Somma

ERWC

10 May 2017

Reflection Letter

For my reflection letter, I have chosen Racial Profiling, Good Food/Bad Food, and my

Into the Wild essays and annotated articles, editing, and outlines as my personal evaluation of

progress work. From this work, I will reflect on what I learned about reading the text and

annotating it, drawing conclusions, writing topic sentences, and integrating quotes that support

my claims, that I have developed, and my strengths in paragraph format and descriptive wording,

and my weaknesses in reading and understanding the texts and having to use more complex

words and sentence structures. I will address my academic essays, of how I am now able to apply

the differences between summarizing, quoting, and paraphrasing evidences that I have learned,

how I have improved on understanding novels by doing notes and activities after every chapter,

and goals that I have for my writing skills.

Of all the essays I have completed this senior year, my favorites were Racial Profiling,

Good Food/Bad Food, and the Into the Wild essay. From just after changing english class levels,

I immediately went into Racial Profiling. I chose against Racial Profiling because I do not

believe it is right to discriminate others based on anything less than their personality, especially

when the police system was directly targeting colored people. For this essay, I received a 95%
from what Mrs. Di Somma explains multiple times as excellent! A great way to start off the

school year in an already new class. Next essay was Good Food/Bad Food, a

proposal/presentation essay format that gave us the ability to instead share with my fellow

classmates the knowledge from the topic I was discussing. Needless to say, I performed very

well and got a 97%, but why I am so proud of this essay was because I was already going to

become a Marketer once graduated from college, that I wanted to make sure that I performed in

front of my classmates as if I already was. The third essay was about a novel we read called, Into

the Wild, and wrote a literary analysis about it. My topic was how Chris McCandless was a

full-hearty fool, of how he went off from all of these great opportunities his parents provided

him, and he still went off on an adventure that got himself killed. I received a 90% on this

particular essay from I was focused on the topic and opinions about the novel and Chris

McCandless.

We also did some prep-work before we actually wrote the essays, where it majorly

helped me realize topics from the novel, and stay more organized in understanding the novels

meanings. One of the prep-works that we did was on annotating articles; going through articles

of research that would help make the understanding of the information given a lot more easier,

and in gathering sources to put eventually into essays easier as well. One essay we did this

mostly on was the Juvenile Justice essay where we had conducted some research from both

online and the ERWC handbook. This has helped my abilities in making subjects more clear to

understand, since I have had some difficulty in understanding details in novels or resources, and

in staying awake while reading the information. Another prep-work that we did was editing; in

re-reading rough drafts and editing them in order to be a better, clearer essay. This helped me in
having to re-read and overview what I have already written, in order to correct myself and

improve on any run-ons or any sentences that made the essay not confident, but unsure of what I

was trying to say. When we did editing on our own with the Racial Profiling essay, I was able to

correct sentences to be more clearly and easier to understand than the first time. Thirdly, we also

did outlines; making writing essays a lot more simpler by writing out the structure of essays and

paragraphs. Every essay we did this year had an outline that we had to do, either right before the

day of the in-class essay, or on our own. Since I have some difficulty in writing an amazing,

clear essay on the top of my mind or in a concentrated amount of time, having to write outlines,

has greatly helped in writing essays more clearly and concentrated on what I am trying to say

since the essay is pretty much already written in an easy format.

Throughout the ERWC class this year, I have improved most upon reading of the text

annotating the text, drawing conclusions, writing topic sentences, and in integrating quotes that

support my claims in an essay. By reading the text of novels has improved my love in reading

novels again. I have always loved reading and writing essays and doing work based off of

novels. Of the novels we had read through, my favorite would have to be Into the Wild since it

had more adventure of this mans short-lived life, it was very interesting. When reading research,

annotating greatly helps make gathering and understanding the information better and easier to

do than just reading and not fully understanding what you have just read. This year, we annotated

majority of what we read in different ways and has improved me stay more focused in what I am

reading, and helped me more in understanding the information more clearly. Another skill that I

have improved on is drawing conclusions from both novels and topics that we are to either agree

with or oppose. This has helped me in creating opinions in my works, and experimenting in
argument papers as well as discussions with fellow classmates, especially on the Juvenile Justice

essay, where we performed arguments and opinions about how we view juvenile justice system.

In the body structure of an essay, I have struggled in creating enticing topic sentences to reach

out and grab my audiences attention. When I was doing the Bullying Research Paper, I needed

to have a firm, strong topic sentence in order to show what I was trying to get at, to show how

impactful cyberbullying was. After almost completing ERWC, I have improved on this struggle,

and now my topic sentences have become more clear and to the point. Continuing on essay

structures, this year, I was taught different ways in integrating quotes into essays. I have been

familiar with some of the different ways in doing this, but ERWC greatly helped my knowledge

and proper usage of integrating quotes in essays, and has successfully helped me in making the

quotes not dumped quotes, but flowing through the essay smoothly.

In this year of ERWC, I have noticed both my two strength and weaknesses in english

from becoming better in paragraph format and being more descriptive as also more fluid-like, to

having no understanding in reading texts and not having more complex words or sentence

structures. One of my strengths: having better paragraph formats, has improved a lot this year

from constantly practicing on essays and writing the many different types of essays, that

explored different ways to structure the paragraphs. An example would be from my first essay of

the year: Racial Profiling, where I had to first show my skills in having structured paragraphs,

that had appropriately organized the information that I was providing the reader. But I have

improved on mainly getting the structures of my paragraphs to the point that it is very simple for

me to stay organized in writing or typing an essay since I am familiar and comfortable with the

paragraph formats and styles that need to be used. Another strength of mine now, is in being
more descriptive and being more fluid-like in my paragraphs and the overall essay. My highest

graded, written essay: Juvenile Justice, demonstrates how I was able to have my essay format

fluid-like, and easy to read and understand from integrating good quotes, and providing good

supporting sentences to help show my understanding of my topics. A weakness in my english

reading is how I am not able to really understanding texts when I read them. For instance, the

novel, Brave New World was and still is hard for me to have a complete understanding of what

the author, Huxley, was trying to show the reader, from weird and wild examples from the text of

the novel. I have always had a trouble in reading and completely understanding the texts of

novels and in finding the meanings of what the author was trying to show me, but even so, by

now I have become a little better at this weakness, but not fully. Another weakness of mine is

how I did not really use complex, literary words or sentences structures that can really excite the

reader. One essay that I did not do so well on, my Bullying Research paper, showed that I used a

little too much simple words, and went on in run-on sentences, which inevitably caused my essay

to sound bland. I have improved on this though, but the more difficult words that usually need a

dictionary to describe what they mean, have not yet been integrated in my english knowledge

core.

Since it is towards the end of my ERWC senior year, the one skill that I have improved

the most on, I believe, is how I can easily tell the differences between summarizing, quoting, and

paraphrasing quotes into essays and in using these techniques to effectively enhance my essays

in providing a variety of versions of quotes, in order to make my essay more flowing and easy to

read. A great example is my Juvenile Justice Argument Essay. From this essay, I was able to

quickly understand the differences of summarizing, quoting, and paraphrasing quotes, and how
to easily put them into my essay. It is by far my highest scored handwritten essay, and is one of

my favorites since it was interesting to use different ways in integrating quotes into essays,

giving it a variety of ways to have the reader interested in the topics that I was writing. Overall,

these new ways in adjusting my essays into making them more interesting has made me fall in

love with writing essays.

In my critical reading skills, I do feel like there are definitely many areas where I can

improve on to further enhance my essays. In particular, my Bullying essay, I could have been

more wise on wording since Mrs. Di Somma had mentioned that I had too many run-on

sentences but how I also did not read the directions clearly and misused my sources in some

areas. After I had fixed these two mistakes, the rest of my essays were 90% and above, which

shows that I have improved greatly on my critical reading skills in those areas. Even though I

had improved on those particular skills, I still have had some troubles with my reading in both

novels: Into the Wild and Brave New World, where I could not really understand majority of

what the authors were trying to show me, the meanings behind different objects or phrases, and

other areas of the novels. Both novels were different than any novels that I had read so far in

high school, so it was very different for me to suddenly having to read these types of novels,

which is both good and bad. Good in meaning that I was able to experience a new type of novel

structure, and bad in meaning that it was sometimes too difficult for me to interpret. Even now,

with the whole year of ERWC almost past me, I still have some difficulty in reading and

understanding texts and meanings of the novels, and is something I want to explore and enhance

my knowledge in.
 Now that the end of high school is almost upon us and our future in working

towards our future goals in life are almost here, I understand that there will be differences

between academic levels from now on, and how I will need to be prepared for them. For what I

have learned about the expectations of college level reading and writing while completing this

english course of ERWC, is how they will expect use to easily be able to write essays properly

and clear, while still using exotic choices of words and sentence structures. Even so, I do believe

I am ready in my abilities in both my reading and writing, and am confident for the challenges

that await for me and all of us later this year in college.