Reflective Essay About Writing Class

When this class first began, what seems like over a year ago, I was a fledgling college writer. I was a novice in college, with basic writing skills. Since that time, so long ago, I have become a moderately better writer. I have gotten a handle on the writing process of narratives, which I previously was very out of practice on. Even writing prose such as the following: “The air in Autumn is so fresh, and clean, and cool. Unfettered for a while from the smog and the fumes we usually inhale” (Essay 1) Beyond that, I have learned how to read things in a way that addresses the topic in an academic manner. Seeing beyond the surface level of readings, and papers. I have also learned how to critically analyze my own texts and writing, when I started …show more content…
I have never gotten a good grasp on writing narratives before, I always feel they are a bit rococo, but I have learned that a paper can have narrative elements while still being an academic piece, a foreign idea to me before this class. I always thought that in order for a piece to be academic, it had to be purely idea and evidence, without personal perspective. Learning this has allowed me to write about topics from multiple perspectives and ultimately create a more persuasive style of writing. I have furthered my ability, and implementation of reading past the first level of the texts in order to get a deeper understanding of literature. I applied this to my writing when it came to picking sources, because any manner of texts can be examined on an academic level, but those same texts can also be examined simply on the surface. For example, in Paper two, using sources about ethics, such as “Ethics in the Real World” which is a book about ethical theory written by a highly regarded writer. On …show more content…
For example, in paper 2 I used sources from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a source by a extremely credible world famous horse trainer, and a source about animal ethics to name a few. In addition to learning how to work many sources into my writing fairly seamlessly, I have also gotten better at including my sources, and knowing how to format them. Before this class I had to put all my citations through a citation generator, now I am able to create them myself. I also used to use less credible sources like Wikipedia, and .com websites, versus the sites I used for this class like Jeremy Bentham Utilitas (paper 2). I have discovered that in using better sources the possibility of bias is less, which makes the piece in question more credible still. This was helped through Professor Shepard making sure the class learned how to use worldcat, which enables you to search for the most relevant sources for any given topic. This allowed me to narrow my searches, streamline the process of finding sources and information, and spend more time on my writing. This also allowed me to use more credible sources, and find reference pieces I would have a hard time finding on my