Reflective Essay Rough Draft

Sabastian Stevens

Jenn Zukowski

ENG 121: Composition 1

12/03/2015

Reflective Essay

At the beginning of the semester my main goal was admittedly just passing the class. I knew that I would learn a lot about writing essays correctly, but at the time I figured it didn’t matter much since I would rarely use this information. While this is still true, I found the material to be more interesting than I thought and so I’m rather glad I gained the knowledge. While I don’t know whether I accomplished my main goal or not (although my optimistic prediction is that I did!), I know that I ended up with more than I thought I would when I first entered this class, which is a good goal achievement in itself.

When I first started the research of my topic, part of me thought I knew very little about the inner psychology of relationships and that this was going to be a very new learning experience. As I read through the sources used through my paper however, I realized that through personal experience that I already knew or resonated with a lot of the points made by these sources. However, I still gained many statistics that I could use for my paper and was surprised by the number of scholarly database articles that I found. From these articles I managed to learn about some interesting theories, such as the one about opposite gender parents fostering stronger relationships in their children.

In the final draft of my research essay I feel like I pulled off a lot of important aspects successfully, on top of improving problems from my previous essay. The biggest problem in my rough draft that I think I refined the best was the logical flow between my thesis and the rest of my essay. I noticed that in my rough draft that the thesis referred to friendships and the rest of the paper focused more on relationships in general. Thus, I changed the thesis and the other parts of my paper that referenced “friendships” when they should have referenced “relationships”. Another thing I think I did well on in my final draft was using the correct amount of pathos, logos and ethos. This was another aspect of my paper that was severely flawed in my rough draft but was patched in my final draft. Considering that my instructor made those particular criticisms clearly on my rough draft, I’m sure she will appreciate those parts of my paper the most, as well as the well-done citations that she usually loves to see.

As far as my computer skills go, I already had a high level of proficiency with computers at the beginning of the semester. That and the fact that this class was mainly focused on word processing and blog posts means that at best, I honed what I already knew. I also knew a lot about the basic research process since it was shoved down my throat during my high school and middle school years. However, I honed my abilities in this area a LOT. I came to realize that a basic understanding of the research process did not equip me well for writing great essays. I needed to learn the inner workings of MLA formatting and using good sources, which I eventually came to learn right around when the research essay final draft rolled around. I still feel like I could make improvements in almost every area (especially the research department), but for now, my current knowledge should be satisfactory.

There are many aspects of the research process that are absolutely critical for students to master, such as correctly citing sources and using informative and relevant sources to make a paper more interesting and credible. I do like the satisfaction of implementing all of the important aspects of a paper using the research process, as well as reading the final creation. However, I do not enjoy the research process for the most part. Looking through large articles for relevant and powerful information is a tedious task and citing other people’s work is needlessly complicated. Fortunately, I felt like I got enough time to effectively create my paper and there were many useful assignments to facilitate our learning. Overall, though, I think the research process needs to be less complicated so that there doesn’t need to be so much resource devotion to making a “correct” essay.