Makenzie Matthews

English 2010-093
Reflection Paper

Matthews 1

English 2010 Reflection Paper

I wrote in three different genres for my English 2010 class being a
memoir, an evaluation, and a position paper. It was required that every
paper be related to a single topic. Due to this I chose my topic to be child
abuse as I had a friend that died as a result of child abuse and it affected me
greatly. In addition to this, since child abuse is an issue in many aspects of
society I knew it would be a subject I could stay interested in. For the
evaluation I chose to do child abuse in religion since faith healing related
deaths are still a serious problem and little is being done about it. I chose to
continue on religious child abuse for the position paper since I had already
done research specifically on faith healing and religion and I could reuse
those sources.
Just a few of the strategies of argumentation I practiced while writing
my essays included counter arguments, supporting evidence, specific
examples, strong thesis statements and the use of ethos, pathos, and logos.
For both my evaluation and position paper I researched specific examples
from credible sources about children who were experienced abuse cause by
their religion. I used these examples to bring pathos into my writing while
still maintaining ethos. By using the strategies of argumentation, I was able
to communicate a reasonable persuasive idea.
When researching for my topic I found sources that focused on
providing information about child abuse and child abuse laws. I looked at
each organization and writer and evaluated if they were a reputable source.

Makenzie Matthews
English 2010-093
Reflection Paper

Matthews 2

With my evaluation and position paper being on child abuse and religion, I
also found sources that had information on religions and their practices. After
researching child abuse statistics, laws, stories, and religion and establishing
the credibility I had enough valuable information to write a logical essay.
Peer review was essential for the review process. It helped me
understand what aspects of my papers still needed to be elaborated and
know what was working well. One point someone made on one of my papers
stated that I was making great use of information about abuse in religion. I
used this information so that I would not remove any of the detail that
helped my story when editing. As for a suggestion that I received that helped
me know what I needed to change was a comment on my memoire about
how it did not seem that we could be friends if she could never play after
school. To fix this, I changed my sentence structure and word choice to
emphasize that we became friends at school but because of her abusive
household she could seldom play with any other children outside of school.
During peer review I contributed to helping other people write great essays
as well. I would point out weaker areas in essays as well as provide
suggestions to make their arguments stronger, such as finding a statistic to
back up a claim. Another way I left suggestions on my peers papers is when
I would point out areas where they forgot to cite a source or cited it
incorrectly. After implementing the suggestions from the peer review the
quality of my papers were improved immensely, and I hopefully helped their
papers as well.

Makenzie Matthews
English 2010-093
Reflection Paper

Matthews 3

After the professor graded our papers I went back and looked at his
suggestions. I fixed a few grammatical errors I missed the first time and
changed my word choice and sentence structure in a few areas. I added
transition sentences to multiple paragraphs as well as made the significance
of my supporting paragraphs more apparent. The greatest strength of all my
papers is the background and detail that I provided for my audience. If I were
to go back and do anything differently, I would focus on a different type of
abuse for one of my essays.