Dmitri McDaniel

Professor Beadles

English 115

December 8, 2019

Essay Reflection

For the longest time I thought that my level of writing was very limited, that I’ve already

reached my peak in composing essays. However it wasn't until I took this class I realized that

there was still a lot of room for improvement and some refining that I needed to do. Throughout

the English 115 class I was able to learn how to better develop my thesis, how to properly cite

and support my evidence, and most importantly how to use better diction and grammar. These

lessons helped me to improve my previous work and correct some repeating problems that I

faced.

The first essay we wrote about in this class, really was an eye opener for me. The

assignment was to determine who used the best rhetorical device out of a set of three authors, I

noticed that I concentrated a majority of focus on only one author rather than all three of them.

On top of my miscommunication of the prompt, I had very poor word choice in that essay

making it very incoherent and hard to understand. This affected my grades heavily, but was a

great opportunity to learn a little more about connecting my ideas better. By being able to

re-evaluate my work, I was able to learn how to better connect the claims I made in my

paragraphs to my thesis. In addition to this, I replaced some unnecessary words and sentences in

order to make it a lot easier to read.

 I took note of the grammar issues and the problems I had with connecting my thoughts

together in my second essay, however I still struggled to make ends meet. My second essay was

an analysis of a short reading we had, we were prompted to compare this reading to how it may

represent our own society. I feel as though I was able to get my thoughts across in the cost of

poor diction and poor usage of citations. In my reflection I changed a few sentences to better

elaborate on my ideas, but this too proved troublesome as the entire structure of some paragraphs

would be needed to be changed in order to make it flow better. Over all, I learned that using

simpler word choice is a great way to tie points together, but is a poor choice to make when

trying to further demonstrate your literary abilities.

In my final essay in this class, I feel as though there was very little major mistakes. The

essay was to interpret a different form of media in order to work on our analytical and

comparative skills. In this essay I tried to use a mix of both simple and complex grammar when

needed, but strayed away from abstract and overly descriptive words to make sure the reader

wouldn't be mislead with my syntax. Some issues that I stumbled across was trying to make the

essay sound less “mechanical”. I felt as though the tone of my writing was very dull and

systematic, i couldn fix this in my revision as it would cause me to rewrite the entire essay.

Instead, I choose to fix to minor grammar mistakes that I had and try to connect the claims that I

had in my rebuttal a little better. Personally, this essay was probably the best one I wrote in this

class, as I was able to use all the skills that I learnt from the other essays.

This class helped me realise that there is always more room for improvement. The

students in the class along with the teacher indirectly encouraged me to try harder in this class,

breaking my habit in poor timing and poor editing. Throughout this semester I was able to gain
more knowledge on how to properly cite my evidence, develop a more efficient thesis, and how

to properly use creative syntax.