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Ximena Garcia

English 1302 - 201

Judith McCann

9 May 2022

Final Essay Reflection

Getting to reflect over your work gives you the ability to learn from your actions and

become better on what it is that you are reflecting. These actions do not necessarily need to be

bad, but they help you visualize how one improved on with their work, and where one struggled

as well. This can even include the feelings and emotions of the writer and author on how they

felt throughout a certain time frame of the journey they are reflecting upon. With that said, keep

in mind that there are different ways people reflect over their work. But my way of reflecting

was by looking back at my entire English 1302 semester course and getting to understand how I

felt over certain assignment that we had to do. For example, recognizing the easy and hard

challenges that I had to overcome in the English 1302 class, the types of things I used when I

wrote my essays such as rhetorical devises and how I used them, and things I learned as a writer

that I would believe was useful and eventually use in the future as well and things that I learned

that I would not believe useful for future events.

For the rhetorical choices made by me during my three essays, I would say that I used all

three rhetorical devices, pathos, ethos, and logos. This is because I used pathos by appealing my

writing towards the readers with trying to touch their feelings a bit, used logos by showing the

audience some logic by demonstrating the results. As well as I used credibility with ethos by
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obtaining information from multiple sources our of peer-reviewed websites. To begin with, I

mainly used pathos towards the end of all my essays to give it sort of the last “cherry on top”

feeling. Mainly because I wanted the readers to finish reading my essay and end up with a

feeling where they would just be wordless, make them stop and think of what they just read. That

was why I chose to hit the audience with feelings. Ethos on the other hand, was used by me

throughout the entire essay for all three of the essays. This is because I needed to obtain quality

information that was true and that I could trust on to begin my experiment for the first essay, and

to write about the claims that multiple authors made for the second and third essay’s. Not to

mention that for all these essay’s, I made sure that all the sources I used were peer-reviewed by

someone valuable, either a doctor who what specialized in those topics, or someone else. Now

for the last rhetorical device that I used, logos, I would say I did use it but, I did not show it with

statistics. My way of showing it as a writer was by demonstrating the results of what I learned,

mainly from essay one where I did my experience, and essay three, where I was able to show my

opinion on whether the authors claim was right. This was because, since I was the one doing the

experiment, I would end up experiencing the results, and if what the authors claimed would

happen, happened, then the experiment would end up be successful and the claim would be true.

To my surprise, both authors, were true.

Now when designing my portfolio website, there was not much of a variety of rhetorical

decisions that I used. Although I did write much information on each page, around 3-4

paragraphs per section Most of the information written revolved around the same topic of two

rhetorical devices, logos and ethos. My writing in the website included basic information of what

the audience would find once they clicked on the buttons and opened the documents of

assignments, drafts, invention worksheets, and prompts. There is provided information such as
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the three different prompts that one had to work on per essay so the reader will not be lost when

it comes to them having to read our essays. As well as also there being information on what each

thing is. Such as how the there is a difference between the drafts one and two. Not to forget to

explain what invention worksheet are and write a bit about what it is we did on them and how it

is that they helped us as writers in order to organize our thoughts. Apart from logos, I also used

ethos in my portfolio. How? By writing my paragraphs with as much character as I could to

maintain the focus of the reader towards my portfolio and persuading the reader that the claims

claimed by the author and me, the writer, were correct. How did I do that in my portfolio? By

writing some of the results found by the experimenter, which in this case, was me.

In full honesty, I had much trouble having to deal with the creativity of my Weebly

portfolio. Artistic and designing ideas do not come easily to me, therefore there was not any

assignment or work that we did as part of my English 1302 course that helped me design my

website portfolio. But there was something different that in fact did influence me a little bit. The

words. Think about it, each page has a different title, and I based my design of each page

depending on what the title was, because each title is based upon the content of the entire page.

For example beginning, with my home page, I would begin to introduce my portfolio and what

everything will be about. All of my three essays and the process of making them, which is what I

talked about through the entirety of the portfolio, was about how one person is able to change.

Therefore, I placed a picture of a person meditating alone. Why? Because many relate meditating

with reaching a new version of themselves, which is exactly what I am talking about. As well as

I introduced myself and wrote a little about me, since I am the author of all the work and essays

the reader will read. Another example is the page called, Invention worksheet. What does one do

on the invention worksheet? They write down ideas and brainstorm of what one can write about
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in their essay. This also helps the authors distribute the information in a clean order. Now, this

influenced me to decorate the invention worksheet page a certain way by placing specific

pictures related to the brainstorming topic. For example, I was able to decorate the page with

pictured of sticky notes that have words written on them, as well as another picture that was a

plastic demonstration on a brain, a blank puzzle being placed together, and even a picture on

someone’s notes with several sentences highlighted.

One thing that I really appreciate that my English professor taught us was how to do in-

text citations. At the beginning of the year, our professor decided to focus on a topic that many of

us at the time, were not very familiar with, the use of in-text citations. Our English professor

wanted us to learn the importance on why writers must give credit to other authors when writing

about what they had mentioned, and she also wanted us to learn how to do it ourselves in case we

ever needed to do it ourselves for future assignments. Overall, the process in learning how to

write the in-text citation was easy, and we did end up using it throughout the entire English 1301

course year for the three different essays that we wrote. Not only that but, once we learned how

to cite and give credit to the authors in the essay, about four months later, in our physics class,

we had to write a paper about a sickness, and we had to write is a specific way, which to our

surprise, included us having to use in-text citation. In fact, our physics teacher assumed that we

did not know how to do the in-text citations, so she was going to teach us that day in class.

Lucky for us students, we already knew how to do it thanks to the couple of days our professor

took time and importance’s to separate class days in learning all about in-text citations and how

to do them.

On the other hand, one of the tactics that I learned over the course of English 1302 that I

know I most likely will not use in the future, is the constant practice of not being allowed to use
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any personal pronouns in any of our essays. This is because, my entire like all of my essays had

at least one type of personal pronoun. No, I’m not talking about the one that is overused by many

people, the wont “I”, I’m talking about the regular everyday saying such as she, he, you, we etc.

It was very frustrating having to deal with such a new version of writing. It was such a hassle

because, before this course, I had never done something like this before, where I would have to

write about an essay that involves talking about us, without the reader knowing that the author is

the person the writer is talking about. Just to make it worse, many of us had never done practiced

that type of writing before. Therefore, the reason why I believe that I this tactic will not apply to

other courses or other writing assignments any time soon is because, never in my life have I been

asked to write in such a way like this.

At the beginning of the year, my biggest challenge and weakness that I had was my

constant struggle to try and avoid all the personal pronoun words. Since never in my life before

this English 1302 course I had practiced such thing, it was a new thing that I had to deal with. As

well as it was not just that I had to practice. Not only that, but it was a constant struggle mainly

because we not allowed to use personal pronouns in any of the three essays throughout the entire

semester course which made it a real struggle to overcome. One the other hand, a strength that I

noticed I had in writing with my essays was that I can very easily demonstrate feelings through

words so the reader can understand. I was even told my several of my peers when they read my

essays that whenever they read my writing, they feel as if I write in a very “poetic” way. So that

was one of my strengths that I noticed I obtained through the course of my English class.

One of the most challenging aspects that I came across when trying to create my Weebly

website for my portfolio had to be the decorating. Sine I am not very creative. On the other hand,

the easiest thing, or least challenging thing that I got to do for my portfolio had to getting to
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explain what each thing was about. This is because I already had it at the back of my head in

memory, and I did not have to go back to check anything. This made me save time and effort to

let me focus on other things from the portfolio.

Overall, I know that for sure my journey as a writer has still not ended, and it will not end

any time soon. There is much space for growth and improvement. There are multiple things that

learned over the course of my English 1302 semester, and there will be many ahead of me to also

learn as well. With that said, getting to reflect over this on my semester year made me realize

how much I have improved as a writer, as well as how much more space I have to become a

better one. I have now learned that for me, there is a never ending, journey for improvement.