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Astrid Diaz
Professor Ditch
English 113A
7 December 2014
Reflection Essay
Just a couple years ago, I was still an English Learner Student that was still learning
how to say and write my name is in English. My senior year in high school was one of
the toughest, since I had to take additional English classes in order to graduate and be at the
English level that a regular English speaker student has to be. I remember that I always had
trouble when it comes to speaking in public. Before this semester started, I had already told
myself that this was going to be a challenging class because English has never been my
strongest subject. I do not like the fact that when you are writing Essays, you have to follow
a lot of rules so that your writing would make sense. For example, when writing my
progression 1 essay, I had to follow certain rules such as, explaining every quote I had
found from the text, writing in MLA format, and having to connect all my arguments with
my thesis statement. However, what I like about writing is that you can really go into
different directions depending on what your position in an argument is, and to be the only
one in control of my writing. I also love that you can really sit and write for hours and
hours without even noticing the time.
Back in high school, I learned about rhetorical appeals such as ethos, pathos, and
logos. I had an idea of what these appeals were, but I never really had the chance to apply

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them into my writing until Professor Ditch Introduced them in this course. I was also
introduced an important concept which is gender construction. Before I learned this, I never
thought about how we in society do gender every day. It made me realized of how wrong
I have been when it comes to gender performance, and it really changed the way I see the
world now.
I encounter myself with many challenges in this semester. The greatest challenged I
had was presenting progression three to the class. Like I said at the beginning, I have a fear
of speaking in public. I get really nervous, and start feeling like I am about to have a heart
attack. Another challenge I had in this course was waking up early to go to class. Right at
the beginning, I was the type of person that would leave everything to the end, so sometime
I would have to stay up all night in order to finish my papers, and still having to go to class
at 8am. I realized that the way I was doing things was not going to take me nowhere. So I
started to put a lot of dedication, and managed my time. In addition to this, I also had
troubled with coming up with a strong thesis, and coming up with a counter argument. At
the beginning when I was doing the prospectus for progression one, the comment I got back
was that my thesis was too general. Even though I had trouble with my thesis, I did not give
up and went to the LRC any time I needed help. Despite the fact that I am not that good at
writing, I managed to do my best and got good grads on both progression one and
progression two. I improved a lot on my writing skills. Now I know that an essay needs to
have a strong thesis, and it also needs to have strong evidence to support your argument in
order to be credible.
Something that has made me proud is that I have come to understand more why
people perform the way they do, and that they conform to the roles society has made for

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each sex because they want to be accepted in society in order to fit in the category of
masculine or feminine.
Throughout this semester, I have had many ups and downs. I know English is not
my strongest subject, not only because I really dont like writing, but because I am still in
the process of learning English, but that has never stopped me from accomplishing my
goals and it never will. If I could give advice to a new student on how to succeed in their
writing class, is that never give up on something just because you think you are not good at
it. If you think you are not good at writing, is because you have never written before.