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Carolina Herrera

ENGL 1301 280

Julie Baker

April 24, 2024

Learning, Experiencing, and Growing: A Reflection Essay

Although I was a good student in all throughout my high school English classes, I had

always felt unconfident about my writing. As I sat across from my advisor, I thought internally to

myself whether or not taking an online English course was the correct decision to take as I had

never taken an online course at the university and did not know how it would farewell for me.

However, my initial doubts were cleared by the first day of the course opening up and being able

to see all the details and content that were on the Blackboard course page. Viewing what was in

store for me persuaded me into not changing the class to be in person. Being in this class has

shaped me to be a better author through the textbook chapters, instructor feedback, and peer

reviews, and ultimately, has helped me become more confident in my writing. From the lessons

in class to the essay prompts, I believe that I have become a stronger and better writer than I was

before the class. Throughout my class reflection, I will discuss the various ways I have grown as

a writer as well as the lessons I have learnt because of being in this class.

One of the first lessons that I learnt was about drafts and how it is okay to have mediocre

first drafts. Even though I knew I was a semi fine writer before I began this class, my first drafts

have always discouraged me. I carried this idea that if a bad first draft is the first thing you write,

then you are not good. That sentiment had weighed down on me and made me unconfident in

whatever I wrote. The Week 3 Homework Discussion Board focused on the specific topic of bad
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first drafts. The article for the week 2 was titled “Shitty First Drafts” and focuses on the topic of

the different draft stages that writers may experience. What impacted my way of thinking the

most was this quote: “There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on

page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you're supposed

to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go but there was no way to get

to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.” (Lamott 93-96). After reading

that, I had felt like a lightbulb had turned on and something in me clicked; you need to get

through a mediocre, subpar early draft in order to direct your writing. I would never reach a well

written final draft without stumbling on the way. This encouraged me to have more faith in

myself as a student and a writer, not just in English classes, but in any other class that will

require essays.

Throughout the class semester, all the essays we wrote were centered on the idea of

analysis. My main takeaway from writing these essays was the analysis needs to go beyond

deeper than the surface level. For example, the Unit 2 Essay genre focused on visual analysis.

While it could be easy to just state the obvious such as “the chair is blue”, I needed to go deeper

than that. Why is the chair blue, what does blue represent in this context, what other colors or

details surround the chair? By doing this I learnt how to properly analyze images. However, by

Essay 3, I once again felt unconfident. By far, Essay 3 was the most challenging essay I had

written in the class. This is mostly due to the fact that I had to analyze a peer reviews scientific

article. What helped me write this essay was having a content tutoring session at ACE. My tutor

helped me with finding rhetorical devices as well as how to an analyze research article. Due to

my major, I will most likely be looking at more research papers, so what I learnt throughout

writing the genre analysis papers will help me throughout my future as a student.
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Compared to other English and writing classes I have taken, this class was much more

interactive with the other students despite being an online class. In each unit, we did peer reviews

where students were assigned to two other student drafts and had to review the contents and

suggest edits. Through these peer reviews, I got to know what specifically I needed to fix and

revise with the peer review sheets that other students did. I also did peer review forms for

students. This proved to be beneficial to me as not only did I potentially help another student, but

I also improved my ability to proofread, revise, and edit more efficiently. I also hope that I was

able to help others and provide insightful feedback. This cooperation helped me with how to

properly communicate with my classmates and how to provide insightful feedback.

On the topic of feedback, after I had turned in the final essay for each unit, my professor

would give an assessment of my essay. The assessment would highlight what I did well in as

well as what I needed to improve and fix for the revision. For my revision of an essay, I chose to

do Essay 1, written genre analysis. I thought it would be symbolic to choose that essay to revise

as it was the first essay I had done for the class, and I would return to it with more knowledge

and experience than what I knew during the first unit. It was easy to find the mistakes I had made

and fix them. One of the significant errors I had made was that I had forgotten to state what the

document I was analyzing was. Something as simple and easy as that has somehow gone over

my head. Another notable error I made was that I did not have a clear thesis statement. Another

thing that is essential to writing had somehow went past me. On the other hand, the most

challenging part was having to figure out what I needed to restructure while also trying to keep

my word count under the maximum. I spent a good amount of time trying to figure how I should

fix my essay while still staying true to the original final draft. Adding on to that, I had to

reanalyze the document I had chosen to be examined to write about to see if there was anything I
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had forgotten to include. Overall, my experience of revising and editing Essay 1 has proven to

me that I have gained useful knowledge from the class that I can use in other fields where I will

need to write essays.

One of parts for the final for this class, we were instructed to create a website portfolio to

showcase our essays, assignments, and other pieces of work completed during the semester. In

order to communicate what a writing unit focused on, I provided descriptions that are from the

class content prompts. Through doing this, I was able to clearly explain to the audience who may

not know what a visual or written analysis is. As for my writing process, I explained it in a way

that described how I felt about writing the essay from the first draft to the final draft. I included

all the challenges I faced as well as the highlights throughout my writing process.

The most challenging aspect that I faced during this course was the edits and revisions

that I made throughout the writing process. I honestly felt that the editing process was more

strenuous and challenging as opposed to writing. The reason why I found it to be more difficult

is because I am not good at proofreading and revising my own work. What helped me overcome

this was all the feedback I received from peer reviews and from the professor. Additionally, I also

found the process of analyzing an image, document, and article to be challenging. This is

because I had to take time to assess what I was analyzing and seeing how I would explain it in

my essays.

Stated earlier in the previous paragraph, the writing process for the most part was not

hard and even at times, I found to be enjoyable. I have always enjoyed the actual writing portion

of English and writing class because I like to express myself using words and imagery. Though

this class focused more on analysis, I still found myself being able to do this. Specifically in

Essay 2, which focused on a visual analysis of elements on a visual text. A strength that I
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discovered while doing the essay analysis is that I’m very good at analyzing hidden details in

visual texts and finding how they play a role in the meaning of the visual. Because of the prompt,

I was able to explain the imagery of the movie poster I had chosen and looking into the different

meaning of the colors used, camera placement, etc. This is a quote from my essay that uses

imagery: “The 2017 movie, “The Florida Project,” movie poster is a bright and beautiful poster,

with saturated colors and magical elements, such as the rainbow in the background, giving off

the essence of a dream-like, utopic state.” (Herrera 1). The visual analysis was my strongest out

of the 3 essays written and it is the essay that I take the most amount of pride in. It was the least

difficult essay to write, and it was also the essay that I found myself looking forward to writing.

This course has taught me a lot about how to present analysis of different mediums as

well as how to write at a university writing level. However, I personally do not feel that I am

prepared to be a part of the academic writing community. Although I would like to, I still feel

that my level of writing might not be up to par with that standard just yet. With that being said, I

hope that in the near future I will be able to confidently say that I am a part of the academic

writing community. Though I no longer doubt my skills as a writer as much anymore, I feel like I

have a bit more to go. Furthermore, I genuinely enjoy and find joy in expressing myself through

writing even if it is not directly or intentionally creative writing. This course was honestly what I

was needing in order to step outside of the realm of creative writing that I had been in while in

high school and it challenged me to look for hidden meanings, rhetorical devices, elements, etc.

As the semester is drawing to an end, I look back at how I first entered the class, unsure

of myself and of my writing. The insecurity that I had about writing has lessened as I gained

confidence throughout the course. I have learned to find more value in my writing, my

developing writing skills, myself as an author. Through the class discussion, homework
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assignments, essays, peer reviews, I have gained more respect for every writer out there that

exists, including myself. I learnt how to respect myself as Carolina Herrera, a university student

and writer. I gained so much useful knowledge not only about writing, but as myself. I learnt

what it means to write and to be an author. My biggest takeaway from being in the class is that,

just like the name of our textbook, everyone’s an author. No matter how small or short your work

is or what level you think you are at, you are still writing and creating a piece.
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References

Lamott, Anne. “Shitty First Drafts.” Language Awareness: Readings for College Writers, 9th ed.,

St Martins Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 2004, pp. 93–96.

Carolina Herrera Essay 2 “The Florida Project Poster Analysis”