Reflective essay
Learning how to proficiently communicate within a society through the written word is something that every college student is taught in their classes, but most importantly, in English. This is simply done by presenting the students with a challenge and the student is required to “rise up” and meet the challenge. These challenges also come in various ways, as a research paper, and literature analysis, or a literature comparison. These are perhaps the three most common challenges that are found within the English curriculum.
Each one of these challenges was presented to me in my English 102 class. The last three essays that were written each fell into one of the categories. Essay two was the comparison, essay three was the research paper, and essay four was the literature analysis which also needed research. Each of these essays worked to improve writing in a specific way. They also opened up issues that are occurring in our society today.
Essay two as mentioned, was the comparison essay. We were required to read a play and a book that focused on a similar subject: war. In order to effectively write the essay, we had to read both pieces of literature and determine what was unique about each one and what the similarities were. Through this process, I learned to see how similar pieces of information can be presented in a completely different light. Also it helped with writing because it showed how to use different describing techniques to draw in the reader. Each technique depends on certain elements of writing to display the information and each is equally effective. This is what I learned from Essay two.
Essay three, as a research paper, helped along two things: who to effectively research and gather information and how to present it in the paper. I took one simple excerpt from the book and researched the history and the idea that was being expressed. Once this was done, I systematically presented the information by first explaining the background and how it affected the story before going over the story itself. This helped me to formulate a better idea on what information is useful when researching about a piece of literature, which then helped me with Essay four.
Essay four was perhaps the most challenging essay of the semester. This is because it required that we not only understand the piece of literature that we were analyzing, but to also answer any questions we had about the text by researching the ideas that were in the book. This is very useful in real life because it helps the student realize that if they do have a question about something they are reading that they can find the answers through various resources. It also showed that almost nothing is ever completely made up. Every story written will be a reflection of something that has happened in the past, is happening in the present, or will happen in the future.
I speak of these three essays because they are what I learned the most from in this class. Yes the discussion boards were helpful, but the best way to learn is through trial and error. When that comes to writing, then that means writing papers. After all, practice makes perfect right? We did loads of other writing assignments but these are the ones that were truly challenging and required some serious brain power to accomplish. Through it all I have improved my writing.
Conversely, I didn’t find that the discussion boards really improved my writing. All it really did was to help me see what the other students in class were thinking on writing about, so that I would not write about the same thing as them. Overall though, the class was good even if it was very time consuming, but hey its college and that is to be expected. As always whenever you write, you learn something, so I learned a lot in this class.
