Reflective Essa'y First Draft

English 5A-31

09 December 2019

Reflective Cover: Becoming a Real Writer

In this reflection, it is my goal for you understand and observe my journey of my writing in this portfolio. I enclose two works that I have submitted for an introductory class at California State University Fresno, English 5A: “College Could Cost You More Than Money” (report) and “Overlooked but Not Forgotten” (analysis). I have included these projects because they demonstrate my evolution as a writer. In this reflection, I will analyze my strengths and weaknesses of each project and express my progression as a writer throughout the course.

While writing my textual analysis “Overlooked but Not Forgotten,” I was tasked with analyzing advertisements of my own choosing. An analysis is, “a genre that methodically examines something by breaking it into parts and noting how they work in relation to one another” (Bullock G/I-2). It was our job to choose two images or use a video of a common kind of argument in our culture to analyze and break down. In the prompt, we also had to include three sources, two being from our Norton Field Guide and a third of our own choosing. The sources we read for class mostly had to deal with a social expectation women had to hold in society and how they are viewed. Inherently with these sources in mind, I chose to narrow down my topic to women empowerment and to analyze and breakdown two ads from Stabillo Boss (a highlighter company). I think this project was my strongest one of the assignments since it was the last project, so through trial and error it was my most polished piece.

The analysis “Overlooked but Not Forgotten” really allowed me to write about something I felt was important, I had the chance to explore the idea behind these advertisements which lead me to the conclusion of hidden women’s success. Purpose is, “A writers goal: to explore ideas, to express oneself, to entertain, to demonstrate learning, to persuade, to inform, and so on” (G/I-29) and so my purpose was to explore what the advertisements were conveying with elements such as color choice and the words the company used. This also lead me to believe that this analysis was one of my strongest papers since I feel like I executed the purpose very well and showed how my progress has grown throughout my projects. This is different from my high school writing career since it was confusing at first and I did not grasp the concept of purpose very well. This carried on into my first writing project in college as I had to revise my papers because it lacked purpose. However, for this project, instead of just analyzing what was in the picture; I took it deeper than the surface of the image and explained why I believed the company was advocating for women. I used hints like what was called into attention by image selection and how the company itself interpreted these images. To be more specific, I feel like my introduction and conclusion is the best focused parts of my strengths, because this is where I stated the main idea behind the advertisements clearly, “Stabilo Boss’ ad wants to acknowledge and empower the women that deserved their success to be known to the world, this is done by highlighting them in bright yellow for a bold and powerful statement”. Evidently, I included the purpose behind the advertisements here and how they chose to do so with color choice. I understood that my main idea must clearly state what the reason was and I believe that this sentence shows that I conveyed the purpose quite well.

However, where I have strengths is also where I have weaknesses. In this project, I feel like I lacked heavily in my ability to summarize and paraphrase. In this project, we were tasked with quoting, phrasing, and summarizing. However, I only really used quotes to explain the idea behind these advertisements. To this day, I am still not confident in my decisions to either summarize, paraphrase, or quote directly from the author even though we took a whole week in class to go over quotes, summarizing, and paraphrasing. I cannot understand what is more important in the sections of my paper, I would not know the situation where I have to differentiate between these to make my paper better. I rather use quotes so that I can convey the main idea much better, but I feel like summarizing and paraphrasing can also be an important factor to your paper. I hope to develop these skills better in my college career.

In my report “College Could Cost You More Than Just Money,” I was tasked with presenting information while researching the topic of college issues and why it was important. I chose a tightly focused topic of college expenses and elaborated how other outliers could affect this along with what could be done to combat the issue. “The problem with colleges are that they need to be more aware about students struggling while in college to be able to create an adequate solution to help them.” Again, with this essay, I feel like I have done a good job with showing the purpose behind my paper. On the other hand, this report lacked introduction of outside sources which I did not spend a lot of my time on. Instead of establishing credibility with my outside source, I merely mentioned them while presenting my information. In “The Reason College Costs More Than You Think,” by Jon Marcus informs its readers about the harsh facts of how long it actually takes students to graduate college.” Evidently, I did not elaborate on who Jon Marcus was or establish his credibility. I should have included his education title, if possible, and if he was a contributing or sole author to the source. I believe that introducing outside sources is one of my weaknesses since in this project, I had to cite my sources well, and I did not do that. By not introducing my outside source, my paper consequently lost credibility. This is something that is extremely necessary to my paper, I must learn how to do this properly.

While I have spent a great deal of time in this class, I have also experienced learning about skills and techniques that can improve my writing career. Although some of my papers highlighted some skills that I execute well, some also showed my weaknesses that I must work on. From starting as a high school graduate who did not enjoy writing, I have now learned the importance of writing and how much I can still grow from this one subject. As I enclose my two projects: “College Could Cost You More Than Money” (report) and “Overlooked but Not Forgotten” (analysis), I also leave you with my analyzation of my growth. This was something I did not think was possible for me to achieve or dwell in. Now, as I look back to my naive self, I understand that it was not that I could not achieve this; but that I was scared of failing if I tried to. This allowed me to understand my weaknesses yet, it also revealed some of my strengths in which I am happy to see. I also hope this allows you to analyze how your teachings have benefited me and the growth I have experienced along with many of my classmates.