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Anthony Campanella
Prof A. Doty
ENGL 101 02
4/29/2024
Self-Reflection
Foundations of academic writing has helped me further develop and expand the writing
skills that I’ve learned throughout my academic career. The course has introduced expectations
and standards that have helped me understand what a college piece of writing should be. The
things I’ve learned in the last few months from this course will help me achieve academic
success through writing. Whether it is for something as concrete as a research project, or as
abstract as a fictional story, I will feel confident in my ability to make a sound piece of writing
with the things that I have taken away from this class. But more specifically, the skill that I
developed the most over the course of the semester was conveying emotion through my writing.
This can especially be seen in my personal memoir, where this skill was pivotal in displaying the
emotions that I felt during the story.
During my time in foundations of academic writing, my ability to incite certain feelings
in the audience dramatically improved. This was a skill that I learned the importance of while I
was writing my memoir. During the process of writing it, I realized that something was missing
that caused it to feel unrelatable and straight-up boring. That made me understand how important
it is to show the audience something rather than just telling them. In my first essay, I argued in
support of parents placing limits on their child’s internet usage. I stated, “The internet being used
in this capacity could lead to children having trouble solving real-life problems later in their lives
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that online resources cannot solve for them”. While this statement gets my point across, it lacks
that “punch” that makes the audience fully understand the negative effects this could have. It
would have benefited me to provide an example of this from my own life. When the time came
to write my memoir, this was something that I actively wanted to improve on. I told the story of
my first day at private school in ninth grade. In the introduction, I immediately set the tone by
saying, “The gloomy sky and the brisk wind hitting my face helped establish a mood that I would
have a tough time shaking the rest of that day”. Rather than telling the audience that the weather
put me in a bad mood, I tried to get the reader to imagine what it would feel like if they were in
my shoes by giving physical details of the atmosphere around me. I used this strategy throughout
the rest of the essay to create a feeling of relatability and understanding to the position I was in.
While I drastically improved in this aspect, I think that I can be more effective with my
use of direct evidence in research related work. In essay three, I evaluated and agreed with an
article arguing that PED’s should be allowed in professional sports today. I cited a quote from the
article that proved how the amount of steroids someone uses is proportional to the risk associated
with using them. In response to the quote, I wrote, “The information he provides is objective,
supporting his claim that athletes can decide for themselves how to use PEDs once they
understand the risks of using them”. Instead of evaluating how he used the quote to prove his
point, I mostly just restated what he previously said. In the same quote, he introduced a doctor as
the source of his information. Because the assignment was to evaluate his writing, it would have
made sense to discuss the reliability of his source and unpack his argument in more detail.
Writing Essay One for this class was my first experience dealing with a proper, collegelevel paper. At first, it was definitely a little overwhelming. But after gaining experience with
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different types of essays, I am confident that I will feel comfortable dealing with any kind of
writing assignment thrown my way in the future.