Reflection On My Essay

Some students transition from high school English classes to college level English classes without a problem; unfortunately, I was not one of them. In high school, I received all A’s on my English essays. In the beginning of core, my essays were not up to the standards my professor was expecting. My professor pointed out to me that I was making the same mistake, “your essay is lacking development,” she would say. I did not understand what I was doing wrong; certainly, this was the way I’ve been writing all of my essays since high school and it seemed to be just fine. I continued revising my essays over and over, but my professors still seemed to be unsatisfied with my writing. It wasn’t until the 2nd quarter core that I noticed that the writing …show more content…
When interpreting someone else’s idea, I have a tendency to add redundant words. Therefore, I end up changing the entire meaning of their idea. This led me to miss many of the author’s main points. One the most beneficial tools that helped me improve my interpretations of an author’s work is the practice DER. DER is a technique that helps interpret readings and evaluate a text’s purpose. It helped me find the author’s main point by helping me define the words, elaborate on the general ideas, and relate it to my previous knowledge. By doing this, I get a clearer understanding of the author’s main point and can interpret it to the best of my ability along with giving supporting details and logic. This work can also be seen in my Integrative Essay, in which every time I use an author’s statement in my writing, I interpret it in my own words and elaborate it from what I understand. In addition to using DER to understand the text and to provide sufficient contextual information for readers, I also use examples to enrich my ideas as well. I often to use examples from case studies or statistics while I am using DER, to later on elaborate more on these case studies and explain how they relate and support my argument. By using case studies and statistics to enrich my ideas, I have improved on proving a point to my audiences. It lets the audience know that it is not only my …show more content…
Although I’ve gotten a lot better at making my writing cohesive, I still struggle with it when writing. I think the biggest flaw on my Integrative Essay #2 is my macro-cohesion. My micro-cohesion has improved a lot. However, my macro-cohesion needs more improvement. I am able to make transitions from one paragraph to the next, yet my transitions are not strong enough. The problem with this is that I use weak transition words when transitioning paragraphs, instead of making my transitions a couple of sentences