Chimal 1

Christian Chimal

Professor Ditch

ENGL 115

9 December 2020

The Journey Of A Freshman Writer

At the beginning of this class, I felt uncomfortable, intimidated, unconfident, and

insecure about my writing. After visiting the online Learning Resource Center multiple times, I

have learned to make my writing more specific, summarize less, and make the thesis more clear.

The essays I have written in the course made me work with my own online research, films, and

books which I’ve never done before. I have also taken my professor’s comments for my essays

to improve in structured, analytical, argumentative, and focused writing. Over time, my writing

has improved because my rhetoric, organization, analysis, thesis, and summary have changed

which has made me feel like a different writer than I was at the start.

In the assignments of “Project Space”, I struggled with the thesis statement, being

organized, and structuring my writing. In the “Project Space” essay I wrote “The authors use the

rhetorical strategies Ethos, Pathos, and Logos to support their argument by providing outside

sources, research, and human hardship to make their writing more convincing. The excerpt from

Sonia Lyubomirsky has the strongest argument because of her research, public data, personal

study, and her interaction with the reader” (Chimal 1). In this thesis, my professor commented

that my points are unclear and needed to specify how they are examples of rhetorical strategies.

It helped me make better connections with my points and thesis statement more clear. In the

course, my professor provided me with a sheet called “Writing an Effective Thesis”, this helped

me understand the content a thesis should have, what an effective thesis looks like, and what
 Chimal 2

isn’t a working thesis. It also showed me the purpose of a thesis statement and what should be in

my writing to support it. My writing has improved with the handout and the professor’s

comments because they helped me learn how to introduce my topic, make a structured thesis,

and use supporting evidence when writing a thesis statement to make my essay well rounded.

Through “Project Text”, I was able to learn how to do my own online research because I

had never done that before in a class. I struggled with knowing how to work with the online

CSUN Oviatt library using Onesearch, writing about a film, and knowing what sources were

credible for my writing. I learned from tutors in the LRC and from resources my instructor

provided about using filters in Onesearch, finding peer-reviewed articles, and to condense my

search results. In the “Project Text” essay I used a source that talked about Dr. King’s letter from

the Birmingham jail where he talked about the philosophy of nonviolence and connected it to the

idea of John Lewis transforming his suffering into perseverance and impacting his activism to

protest and take action without violence (Chimal 3). This shows how I improved in my writing

because I was able to choose my own online source and write about my interpretation of the text

and connect it to the essay prompt. Learning to do my own research made me become more

comfortable, confident, and more secure about my writing which shows how I’ve become a

different writer from the start of the course.

In conclusion, it was my professor’s comments, the LRC, the essays, and the resources I

was provided that helped me improve as a writer. At the start of the course, I had no idea where

to find my own research, didn’t feel confident, wasn’t comfortable, and secure about my writing.

Compared to how I was at the beginning of the class my writing has changed because my

organization, rhetoric, analysis, thesis, and summarizing had improved. In my writing, I am

analyzing the text, summarizing less, making a clear thesis statement, and using supportive
 Chimal 3

evidence to make my writing more fluent. The time in the course has helped me become a

different writer than I was when I started this Fall 2020 semester.