Reflective Essay

Over the course of the semester, I have worked on four major writing assignments in English 328 that required me to use different strategies and methods when addressing my topic or argument. When examining a text to write about, some of the strategies included looking for strategies that the author used in their work, and then analyzed it. Other strategies included collaborating with other classmates to generate more ideas, and also giving presentations through power point and or video to better illustrate my ideas or arguments. This reflective essay allows me to think back and recall these strategies and consider how they can be applied in future assignments during my college career.


“Analyzing an article” was the first assignment in English 328, and in this assignment I analyzed an article that examined the website Google.com titled, “Is Google making Us Stupid,” in which author Nicolas Carr argued that it was making the world less intelligent. When examining this article, I focused on the strategies he used to develop his argument such as analogies, personal opinion and intensive research gathered from different philosophers and scientist reaching back centuries. My analyses of the work based itself off of the strength of his argument, not so much on the information Carr was giving.

This same approach was used when the class moved to its next assignment, which involved analyzing a professional online journal. I examined The English Education journal Vol.38 No.4, and analyzed the different articles within the journal by once again looking for the authors strategies. This method of analyzing has taught me to become an overall better analytical writer. I still struggle with falling into the habit of summarizing the authors work from time to time, but this class has definitely taught me to be more conscious of this habit and to examine the authors structure of ideas before I begin to write. For these two writing assignments I also relied on the benefits of peer review. By having another classmate go over my rough draft papers, I allowed someone other than the teacher to maybe catch a mistake I’d overlooked while writing, or perhaps give me an idea to help make my paper better.

The last two assignments involved more communication between me and my classmates. The writing assignments still helped me become more analytical, but I had the opportunity to share my ideas with the class. The class “Youtube project” involved me collaborating and sharing ideas with another classmate. Together we analyzed a very humorous but informative video from the website, which examined the social networking website Twitter.com. We were able to discover concepts of communication and connecting people of different backgrounds and races together within the website. Me and my partner saw Twitter as a way of bringing people together in a fun way, and we were able to share are analysis with the class.

The last assignment, “analyzing issues and informing audiences,” allowed me to focus on an issue that reflected my major and address it to the class. As a future educator I thought of an issue that affects students of all ages which is organization. If you do not organized with school documents or you have trouble with time management, then you will ultimately suffer in the classroom. My strategies for analyzing developed over the semester, allowed me to come up with seven issues that I feel hinder a student from being more organized and developed strategies and solutions to help solve them.

I feel I still need work as a writer, but this course has definitely taught me to become more conscious of how I write and to be more analytical. Collaborating with others has taught me the importance of group work in education and its benefits. These skills have already benefited me in my other classes. I have learned to think more critical with every paper that I write for a class, and I hope these skills that they will benefit me long after I have left college and entered the classroom as an educator myself.