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Tara Nichols
Professor Massie
English 1301
6 August 2019
Reflection

Clear and precise communication is vital in many aspects of our professional and personal

lives. The way these essays have developed communication will vary based on what we focus on

in our lives. Potential doctors might benefit from the report essay while aspiring marketers might

lean toward the review essay. My job requires me to be able to share a vision across a wide

number of people, which is something I have always found challenging. A clear vision is created

by organized communication that starts with a strong thesis. Working through the steps of

constructing the analysis essay further proved I struggle with communicating. The analysis essay

taught me how to organize a paper that would create a vision for my reader while bettering my

ability to stay on topic and aligned with the thesis.

I thought that the analysis essay would be simple, but the realization I had was that describing

aspects of the commercial in alignment to the thesis was difficult. My goal was to have the flow

of the paper match the flow of the commercial. This was hard to do knowing the expectation of

each paragraph needed to be strictly about a single topic in the thesis. This proved to me that the

comments that I received in my previous essays were accurate. A problem I had was staying on

topic in each paragraph, without going in to details about another thought. In the review essay, I

received a comment stating, “What’s the criteria”, which confirms the observation that

discussing a topic and staying focused is a necessity for clear communication. In the review
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essay my thesis had the comment “Features are just one category of criteria”. Failure to have a

solid thesis, destroys the foundation of having clear communication throughout the paper.

Unfocussed minds hinder effective communication. This class has taught me that maintaining

focus on the thesis will guide you through communicating concisely. I have been able to spread

the knowledge gained from this class in to my professional environment. The first step in being

able to improve is understanding one’s struggles. This was made clear in the comments of my

first two essays. Writing the analysis essay challenged me and made me think more carefully

about how I was going to strategically organize my essay so that the communication could be

clear.
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