Shay Brody

 

English Composition 1213

 

Beth Hammett

 

May 01, 2025

 

Word Count : 522

 

Reflection Essay

 

Throughout the semester of this English course, I have gained a lot of knowledge regarding my writing skills as a student. When I first started this course, my writing skills were probably more of a high school skilled level rather than a college course level point. If I am being completely honest, I had to look up rules for certain writings we did, I had never written a college level argumentative essay before and I was really nervous about certain language I used and how to come to form a sentence that wasn’t attacking the audience. My first argumentative essay to me was more emotional and personal so making it an argument was hard.

My argumentative essay was over the topic Suicide, I wanted people to take it more seriously and be able to talk about it as an open topic. I had done much research over the topic, had personal experience with it, and understood the measures that needed to be taken in order for it to be a serious topic. I feel as though this topic for me was more emotional and informative rather than an argument. In the beginning I had thought I was doing great on the paper. I was excited because I knew this topic, however when writing this paper, it became more informational and instead of talking about solutions, I talked more about the mental health industry itself.

Although I had made those mistakes, I was able to learn and improve for the next paper I wrote and future papers as well for other courses. In my rhetorical analysis essay, I chose Arthur Albert Camus. I chose Albert Camus because his philosophy and suicide were a perfect match, I had imagined someone standing over a cliff and asking Albert Camus what the meaning of life would be. After reading his stories, I learned that he seemed to have more realistic life point of views and his thoughts on the meaning of life would be beneficial to my paper on suicide. In this paper, I did a pretty good job on describing the kind of study Albert Camus did and what his philosophical studies were. I have also never written a rhetorical analysis paper before so this one wasn’t perfect either, I made many mistakes as I was still learning which skills and prompts needed to be included.

Although I am still learning to be a better writer, this class has helped me improve throughout the semester for almost all of my courses. I used the peer review feedback not only for the English course itself, but for other classes I had papers for. It was easy fixing those mistakes and learning what I can do on certain papers. From this course I learned many things like, how to stay focused on one topic per paper, using certain language in certain types of papers, and how to stay focused per paragraph. My goal in the future is to be able to write papers without having to think twice about what I am doing, I want to be able to wrote and understand my mistakes as I go.