Estrada 1

Jon Estrada
Bevill
ENGL 1301-21
10 December 2014
Self-Reflecting
These past sixteen weeks I have learned quite a lot from this class as well as my fellow
classmates. I learned that I am actually a decent writer. I cross my Ts and dot my Is, but in turn
have horrible MLA Format. In reviewing which major essay allowed me to improve as a writer,
it was the review itself that opened the door to my progress.
Prior to this class I thought I was a horrible writer. I would always avoid English courses
because of the fear of writers block. In order to successfully write that review I had to look at
multiple things that played upon it, such as what message did I want it to relay, and who would
my audience be. I had to fully understand my assignment and the writing processes that needed
to be applied to it in order for it to be a successful essay. What I tended to find the hardest thing
about writing a review was keeping the information together and relevant. There were times
where I wanted to pull something else in to show a relationship between the two but it had very
little to do with the topic of my evaluation as a whole. As well as the relevance I also struggled
with keeping an authorities tone of sorts, I knew what side I was on but I kept outweighing the
options.
My MLA Format was always off the charts as well. I underwent lots of hacker reading to
understand it better along with the failed quiz that showed me where I needed to improve. I am a
big math person. So statistically, I should be bad at English. But, through my struggle I feel like I

Estrada 2
prevailed and achieved a great outcome in this class. I overcame a big obstacle in this class
considering it has been three years since my last English course.
Through methods of peer review and portioned writing drafts, I was able to grasp the
concept of topic sentences and how to form well written thesis statements. During this essay I
really began to understand my writing and was able to execute the proper format required with a
sense of security in myself. In other words, although I still had issues with my Formatting, I
knew more than I did to begin with.
As students, there will come a time when we cannot understand something to its fullest
extent. I dont believe I will ever have a perfect paper but only because I think a paper can
always be improved. My review is definitely one of those papers. I put into it all the
fundamentals we acquired in this class to write the review and found I still have errors and areas
of improvement. I will continue to grow.