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Kelly Duong
Professor Beadle
English 115
29 April 2019
I’ve always despised English, ever since elementary school when I had to try and learn
how to differentiate between verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and so on. Till this day I still struggle
with that. While I wish I could say that after taking English 115, I have found a new love for
English, unfortunately, I can not. However, I can say that I have more confidence in my writing
skills, and have learned a lot more in this class than in any other one of my past English classes.
The major things I learned as the semester progressed were regarding writing longer essays, the
importance and impact of titles, and the necessity of credibility when conducting my own
research. Furthermore, the ample amount of time and activities in preparation for the essays, as
well as the emphasis on learning the different qualities of essays made it easier for me to
understand how to combine them to create a well organized and structured essay, specifically
argumentative essays.
Going in to my first college level English class, I didn’t really know what to expect;
having only taken AP English classes throughout high school. When we were assigned Project
Space, the most worrying aspect about it to me was the four page minimum page count. Prior to
the class I hadn’t written an essay over two and a half pages, so I was uncertain about my ability
to meet the required page count. However, surprisingly I was able to meet and even exceed the
page count by writing six pages for the Project Space essay. I managed to continue the trend with
seven pages for Project Text, and a little over five pages for Project Media. It showed me that I
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had more to say about the assigned texts and movie than I had originally anticipated, and it gave
me a lot more confidence in my ability to write multiple paged essays. After exceeding the page
count for Project Space, it freed me from making my biggest concern page count, and instead
allowed me to focus more on the content of my essay with emphasis on organization and writing
During high school, my teachers never stressed to me the importance of titles, or how
they could be the aspect of an essay that really ties it all together. Originally I thought that essay
titles were simply supposed to be the name of the assignment, not knowing anything different,
but English 115 really allowed me to experiment with my titles, and my progress in becoming
more free and creative with them really shows as I progressed through the semester. My first
essay was titled “Elevating Happiness,” which stuck to the prompt assigned, but, to put it simply,
it was safe and boring. For the next essay, I wanted a title that was a little more visually
interesting, something with a more going on. And so, the title was, “‘The Metamorphosis’: The
Allegory of Life as a Writer.” I think that including my thesis as single phrase for my title made
it more alluring but still kept it straightforward, and on topic, as well as being more visually
interesting with the inclusion of the quotation marks and colon. I believe that my last essay’s
title, “An Atomic Bomb Named Gojira,” was the most interesting as I made it a spin off from the
iconic playwright, “A Streetcar Named Desire.” My thought was to play to the iconic aspect of
the playwright as well as the movie and draw a connection there. Over the course of the class, I
strongly believe that my titles have gotten more amusing and creative.
Prior to the course, I knew what databases were, and even needed to use them for another
class, but I still had no idea how to navigate them, or even how they worked, which was a
somewhat unnerving going into Project Text. I was so used to just looking through google search
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after google search for anything to include in my essays, however, after visiting the library for a
demonstration on how to properly use the databases, I immediately felt more confident in finding
credible sources, and went home that day and started searching the databases with relevant and
specific terms, as we had been taught. When I was using google to find sources, I neglected the
credibility of that source, which is one of the things I learned to start thinking about in English
115, as it was very heavily stressed. In both Project Text and Project Media, I was able to find
credible sources to include to further support my arguments regarding Kafka and Gojira.
While analytical writing is my personal strongest form of writing due to the the multiple
literary analysis essays about literature books we read in my AP Literature class, such as The
Awakening and the incredibly uninteresting and infuriating Tess of the D'urbervilles,
argumentative essays have always been my weak point. When we were assigned the Project Text
Composition. The teacher handed out the prompts, said, “Okay, you have forty minutes, you may
begin,” and for the majority of the time all I could do was sit there as I frantically tried to think
of an argument to answer the politically based prompt. In the end, I could only write the
introduction before the time was up. The reason I struggled with the prompt was because I’m not
a very opinionated person and the prompt was very black-and-white in regards to the argument.
However, in the Project Text essay, the prompt was about interpretation instead of being two-
sided, which allowed me to form a unique thesis, arguing that “The Metamorphosis” can be
interpreted as a metaphor for Kafka’s life as a writer. It allowed me to feel more satisfied with
my argument, and the multiple weeks we had to work on the essay opposed to the forty minutes I
was allotted prior, allowed me to structure my essay in a more organized manner, with each
paragraph having a main claim which supported my thesis. The time also allowed me to think
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about how the evidence and outside sources I chose supported my thesis, and what the best way
to present them in my argument was. This thought process I worked by on Project Text carried
over into my Project Media essay as I began to think of an interesting thesis, and considered
different sources and how I would be able to organize them in my essay. Through the course,
The Professor’s specific and detailed comments on my returned essays, showed me the
points I need to continue to work on more are organization, and formatting, however, over the
course of the semester, I believe I improved on my titles, research abilities, and most
exhausting journey that is English 115, my confidence in both my writing and ability to meet the