Warrick 1
Michael Warrick
Professor Moore
Reflection Essay
Writing 1310
Summing up everything I learned in one semester will be fairly easy because
my style of writing changed completely by the way, the amount of time, and the
resources used to write a single essay. In the past writing an essay I was used to
writing a short decent essay in forty minutes or less and the essay would have to be
good enough to be harshly scored for little grammar mistakes and have enough
meaty details with no sources besides the one used by remembrance because I was
in a AP Literature class. The change from this to a Composition I class where it was
expected to work more than forty minutes on each paper and were also expected to
use outside sources to further my knowledge and understanding of the topic I was
writing about. Honestly this change was a difficult change and almost a completely
different world of writing compared to what I had learned prior to college.
The next change was writing different types of essays that are used to explain
different ideas. In this course I have written a concept essay, a profile essay, a
solution essay, and finally this essay, which is the reflective essay. The concept
essays aim was to explain a concept of life for etc. my concept was family. I
explained different types of families and the effects they have on the offspring of the
specific family. Also sources were used to enrich the essay on content and details.
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The profile essay was a different task where different skills were used to do work
outside of the essay. Some of this extra work was interviewing a person a few times in
order to get facts and a certain story or event in their life to write about. I never had to
interview anyone before in my life so it was a different experience aiming to do new
things and then write an essay on what I learned. This essay was also tricky for me in the
way that I was not accustomed to writing a narrative story like the essays written in the
chapter corresponding to this essay. Next came the solution essay which used yet
different skills that a few I had from high school. Writing persuasively is what I had to
do. This persuasive paper had to address a problem that was local and attempt to give a
solution to this problem. This was achieved by using facts and cited sources once again
to enrich the work. Finally comes the last essay of the course which is the reflective
essay and aims to point out everything or most things I learned or that were new for me
as a writer.
A great thing that personally I had never had before was legitimate help with my
paper from the Writing Center at UCA. Usually in the forty minutes I had to write my
essay there were a few, maybe ten, minutes of thought going in to my brainstorming.
This kind of brainstorming was not that best because I could not have help from anyone
else nor could I bounce ideas off of anyone else. At the Writing Center all of these things
I formerly could not do, I could now do. I didn’t use the Writing Center for every paper
but the ones I did I could tell improved thought process on my idea for my essay. The
people there were great help to non-writers like I judge myself to be.
Length. I have always struggled with writing any essay a decent length. Never
before had I had an essay that had to be a certain length like these in my writing class in
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college; four pages. In the past I might have written one and a half pages or two with
them being handwritten. This course caused me to have to have a lot more to say in my
essays.
Using cited sources helped this length issue tremendously and made the
suggested length seem close to a possibility.
These classes that I compare having the same focus of writing but in two
completely different lights was also a huge shock because I did not know what to expect
in terms of his course until I was already enrolled.
A good difference for me was that the essays we wrote about in this course were
chosen by me and had interest in what I thought and I never found myself writing
something this semester that I didn’t already know a little about the subject area. This
good thing was also helpful in that I was interested in the topic that I was writing about.
This paper is no different in that I am interested in what I did learn and skills I have
achieved over this semester course.