Oh 1

Reflection Letter
Youn Mee Oh
ENG 115
Professor Collins

I have written many essays for my Advanced Placement English classes during high
school. Two of my teachers always taught me a model to strictly follow while writing an essay
such as hook-background-thesis model for introduction paragraph. Although it helped me set up
structures of essay, those never helped me revise actively nor fortify the correlation between my
thesis and my evidences.
For my facilitation, I have read Bird-By-Bird article which talks about way to write your
essay. However, the article included much of authors personal feelings. The author talks about
finding your own favorite reviser; however, I disagreed with this notion a lot so I brought up a
question to ask about how my colleagues feel about this. Asking others of their opinion on a
topic helped me regard counter arguments and understand the other side of my standing.
Throughout this class, Professor Collins often held active discussion and debates
regarding topics of the essays and reading materials. Those helped me realize which argument
point I really stand upon as well as what kind of evidences I desire and how I will connect them
to back up my thesis statement. From my second essay, I started looking around library sources
as well as online scholarly ones. My taste for resources changed from finding easier resources
to finding credible and precise resources to firmly back up my point.
I am not good with revision. Its just like how I am with math question. Once I solve the
problem, I cannot check my work to see if I did right. This is what makes me finish tests faster.
When I do something, I cannot find what I did wrong by myself. When I took SAT practice tests
and many math quizzes in my life, I realized that once I solve it there is no way for me to recheck the answer unless corrected by someone else. It is same with my essays. When I revise,

Oh 2
the furthest I usually head up to is changing few wordings and grammars. Not because I am
confident, but because I am not confident about my thoughts. What I once decide is right, most
likely, never crosses the border into the wrong. However, the discussions from class really
helped me to fully understand where the counter argument comes from. Questions like why do
they think that, and how also gets me thinking how I should counter their sayings. Those
enhances my revision skills by focusing my thoughts on audiences that may think otherwise
from my opinion.
In terms of audiences, I have always tried to focus on general population in America. A
lot of my essays are philosophical, so age target may be above children. I feel that in order to
further improve my essay, I should get better at precisely analyzing my resources. I learned a lot
of social literature through social interactions and discussing major aspects of society such as
technology and gender roles. My semester in English 115 was delightful and passionate.