Academic Reflection Essay

It is still so surreal to reflect back on my first semester as an incoming college student in the ENC1101 course, analyzing at my progression as a reader and writer in literacy. Since the first day of class I set in stone my goals for this class: receive a 4.0 GPA, develop my connecting theories skills in writing, and become more aware of objectives for each Unit throughout the course. All of these goals became achievements that not only make others proud but most importantly give me self pride. In order to earn the grades and achieve these goals, I went after every opportunity that I was given as an incoming college student, such as office hours and extra credit. By taking this course I have gained confidence with the utilization of literacy, and made an addition to my group of impactful literacy sponsors. Once students are finished with high school they assume that there is nothing else to learn beyond the stereotypical five paragraph essay, but they are so wrong. I was able to obtain so much knowledge about numerous course concepts from Writing about Writing, articles, and my professor. These concepts will carry on with me throughout a bright future of writing courses, job interviews, and any other skills that require literacy. The four outcomes listed below will help illuminate how I improved as a writer, by being a driven college student and going out of the way to earn my achievements in this course. In the first outcome I improved comprehending scholar texts,

Many people experience exclusion in their lives; yet, when they feel included, they experience the process of healing. In the memoir Coming Back Stronger: Unleashing the Power of Adversity, Dw Brees’ journey to healing is explored. This experience of exclusion to inclusion is also discussed in Becoming Human by Jean Vanier. The New Orleans Saints accepted Drew, a severely injured quarterback at the time, just as Jean Vanier accepted people with intellectual disabilities into L’Arche. Withal, Drew is given the opportunity to motivate and inspire his team, and those people included in the L’Arche community are given the opportunity to develop new, meaningful relationships. For Drew, having this opportunity results in a milestone for the whole team that represents hope for New Orleans, while the people with intellectual disabilities being able to be in an inclusive community result in the maturity of the heart. Both works suggest that being inclusive towards other people, especially those excluded in society, by welcoming them into a particular community result in a person’s internal and external healing.

The six course goals of this English 109W course are to Engage in writing as a process that includes planning, revision, and editing based on feedback from peers and instructors; Critically read and analyze academic texts; Understand, identify, and analyze the rhetorical situations of academic texts, including their contexts, audiences, purposes and personas; Understand, identify, and analyze the rhetorical situations of academic texts, which may include genre, format, evidence, citation, style and organization; Develop an awareness of and preparedness for the writing they will do through their majors through research, exploration, and or practice of the discourse community’s conventions; and Engage in formal and informal writing that analyzes and critically reflects on their major’s writing conventions and their own writing practices and choices. I perceive that I have achieved all the goals for this course through the various drafts I composed, polished papers I produced, and the supplemental work that I have selected to include enclosed within my portfolio.

This course offers numerous opportunities to improve our writing. In this class, I not only enhanced the skills I already had, but also learned new writing concepts. Before I took this class, I knew that my writing is poor, and I have always wanted to improve it; however, I did not know how and what aspects of writing to improve. So, I came into this class with the ambition to improve my writing, and I have accomplished my goal although there is still room for improvement. At this point of this course, I have learned the elements that successful writing is composed of, and I am now able to categorize the various techniques that can work together to define strong

The most interesting aspect I discovered about my writing this semester is my ability to read, appreciate, and interpret a piece of literature and write analytically about it. In this course I’ve grown to change my reading process completely. I had a tendency to read

As this semester comes to a close, I have become to realize how much I’ve grown as a writer. After taking this class, I have noticed that I have gained more and more of a voice in my writing. When faced with having to write about subjective topics, I have learned how to voice my opinions in papers in order to make them more effective. My writing has greatly evolved because of this class. Not only has it shown me I have to work on sentence variety, but it has also allowed me to work on word choice which is something I have always struggled with throughout my high school career. Struggling with how to put things into words as exactly how I see them has been a struggle for me throughout this course. Despite how much I’ve grown as writer, I have

As this course comes to and end, it was very interesting to see how my writing has changed over the course of the semester. After having taking multiple English classes and writing multiple essays throughout my academic years, I have always been trained to write a certain way. Quite the opposite of being concise, instead I was trained to over explain and analyze the points I was making in my written assignments.

In my ePortfolio, I have gathered a series of my writings that I have completed over the course of this semester. Overall in this entire course I have learned a great deal of material that has pushed me to become a better writer. From my past courses, I have noticed that I am not the strongest writer but I do try my best. With Professor Knox’s tough grading system, he has given me drive to bshow my potiential as a writer. I feel as if my knowledge has increased a significant amount on the following topics/concepts and I support each claim with the correlating artifacts 1) Writing process Artifact 1-Writing Log 3, (2) Discourse Community-Artifact 2 Assignment 2 Partner Review, (3) Rhetoric Artifact 3- Assignment 1, (4) Genre Artifact 4- Reading Notes Week 10; and (5) Critical Thinking, Reading, and Research—Artifact 5--Assignment 5. Every assignment has shaped me into a more developed writer and has prepared me more for ENG 280.

Since the first day of this class, every aspect of this class has been a learning experience for me. As I have said before, my Senior English class was very thorough as far as teaching the basic rhetorical tools and the skills necessary to analysis a piece of writing, but coming to college, I lacked the skills needed to actually put those skills into practice in my own writing. My knowledge of revision and drafting was limited by my habits of only editing grammar or changing a few words to sound like I was academic or qualified. Even though a great deal of this course focused on the skills necessary to be an efficient and effective writer, the last portion of the course was very useful to the development of my skills as a writer. Through revision, I learned how to take unorganized jumble of ideas and claims and arrange them into a piece that makes a useful and compelling argument with a purpose in mind. I find it hard to admit it but I actually found that I enjoyed the satisfaction of revising my work and making it better.

A central part of Rhetoric and Composition classes is being able to understand an apply rhetorical knowledge, critical thinking and reading, the process of creating a paper, and being able to understand source formatting. Throughout this course, I’ve written new types of papers, expanded on my analytical abilities, and have gained valuable information on how to improve on papers that I’ve written in the past. My argumentation and organization have improved greatly by in-class workshops and critical, but well deserved, teacher comments. These skills are essential in writing I’ve learned and improved on many of the goals listed in the syllabus this semester, which will be necessary for my future schooling.

From this course, some of the most important ideas and concepts I have learned about writing in various disciplines is how to effectively interact with my peers during discussion in online posts and in person using “They Say/I Say” techniques, create literature reviews on current academic topics, and make a memo and proposal. I believe that my style of writing has improved and broadened over the semester in terms of citing information in both MLA and APA style, critically analyzing literature and academic articles, and positively critiquing and collaborating with other students on their work as well as mine. I believe that I still need to practice and work on literary analyses; at times I would find myself struggling to develop a narrow and specific thesis and generate the rest of my analysis from it.

My writing has greatly changed since the first day of this class, in a positive way. Before I took this course, I would write essays full of punctuation errors and improper sentence structure. One of my greatest weaknesses was writing conclusions, and through this English class and its assignments, I have improved my grammar and overall writing. Moreover, I have learned how important it is to write drafts and proofread them before settling on the final paper. I am not the same writer I was when I began this class, since my strengths have expanded to include a higher vocabulary and a more focused writing style. However, I can still do more to improve my skills – focusing on wrapping up my essays better – and become an even better writer.

Over the past eight weeks, this course has required me to write more academic prose than I have at any time outside of high school. While my job has required writing long documents, they are almost always persuasive or technical documents. I now reflect on my daily reading and writing in a different way as a result of this class. I can see how I have grown even from the first week to today. In each of the assignments below I can see my own growth and learning.

Education is ingrained in our lives; we are as a society born to learn. The ability to reflect on this habitual learning is what separates an honors mindset from the average. Reflection occurs continuously and effortlessly, as though peering into a looking glass. I reflect in order to increase my potential as a learner and become an honors student. Evaluating my past, present, and future education ultimately will unlock my fullest potential for true academic reflection.

Throughout high school, I took my grades seriously as I maintained an overall grade point average of 93. My grades have always meant a great deal to me, however, I never knew how to correctly study. I had remained aware well before I came to college that my hands-off studying techniques would need to be forgotten and left in high school. However, until Allison Peer visited our class I was still unsure of how to get the most from my college experience and was not aware of how to successfully study. From what I have learned in this class and from Allison Peer I have decided to change a few of my study habits. For example, I would like to stop procrastinating my work and set up a schedule for studying and homework between classes, visit my professors during office hours when I miss class or when I do not understand what we discussed during class, and I have already begun connecting different ideas from different courses together to help me learn the material on a deeper level.