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Alexander Kozlov
Professor Batty
English 28
1 June 2017

Reflective Essay

My experience in English 28 has taught me a lot about my own strengths and weakness

as a writer. The process of having three essays to constantly improve was very beneficial for me,

as I have not written many essays during my time at community college, so this class served as

constructive practice. These essays forced me out of my comfort zone and had me work on my

weaknesses as a writer for all future essays. My three biggest weakness were my structuring,

grammar, and time management.

It became obvious after I received evaluations on my Narrative Essay, that the biggest

shortcoming was the structure of my essays. In my original final draft of that essay, it was not

apparent what the thesis was until halfway through the second page of a three page paper. Often

times, a well-structured essay has the thesis presented at the end of a brief introduction. After

realizing how unorganized my essay was, I had to restructure the entire essay. My experience

writing an outline for the argumentative essay revealed the value of planning my ideas before

writing a draft. If the outline was not required, I would not have done it. I found that the more

work I put in on the outline, the less work I would have to put in on the rest of my essay.

Therefore, making a well-organized outline made my final draft more structured. I am making a

habit of making an outline for every essay I write. Unfortunately my argumentative essay had

many other problems such as grammar and formatting.

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Grammar is probably the second biggest weakness I have in my writing. They include:

comma splices, keeping the tense consistent, and having poor formatting. I didnt know what

comma splices were until the in-class essay workshop. Essentially they are run on sentences with

commas. The inconsistent tone was not apparent until I had my first paper read aloud to me.

Hearing the words of the essay really showed how awkward inconsistent tenses sound. My worst

grammar blunder was probably my problem with formatting. My MLA formatting was never

correct on the first draft and I constantly had random spaces between words and paragraphs.

These problems were a result of my lack of practice in writing essays. Unfortunately, all the

knowledge of grammar and structuring went out the window when I had the in class essay.

Time management didnt seem like an actual problem to me until I wrote the in-class

essay. With essays that are written at home, I can just spend more time on the essay and lose

some time elsewhere. Unfortunately this wasnt an option with the inclass essay. Seeing as I had

an hour to write my essay, my poor time management skills enabled me to deliver a subpar

essay. My time management needs improvement, as an hour was a sufficient amount of time to

write an essay about that article, regardless of how much I didnt enjoy the article. Instead, I

wrote a superficial outline and followed that up with a inferior essay full of comma splices,

incoherent thoughts, and the worst argument I have made in an essay. Receiving the essay back

and re-reading it, showed me more than anything that I really need to work on time management.

This class has taught me about my errors and how to correct them for future classes. My

structuring can be addressed with organizing my thoughts with an outline. My grammar can be

addressed with being more precise with my comma splices and formatting, and my time

management just requires me to practice more with outlines, ensuring that I make an outline for
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every essay until I feel comfortable enough making them out of habit. Without having these

problems brought to my attention, I would continue making these mistakes in future english

classes. This class has helped me grow as a writer.