Eric Cho

ENGW 111

Richards

21 April 2017

Final Reflection Paper

During the course of ENGW 111, I have been able to practice and hone many skills

throughout many papers. From the Superheroes essay about contact zones, to my Personal

Memoir about having a fighting problem, I was able to improve my skills of communicating my

thoughts into tangible written words to readers alike through thoughtful insights and important

inclusions. Personally, I believe that my improvements from Unit 1 to Units 2 and 3 were drastic

and showed a step towards a more encompassing implementation of the learning goals required

for an established writer taking a course in the Department of English at Northeastern University.

I was able to create changes in my Unit 1 paper which I believe makes the paper far more

critical, reflective, and insightful.

The leap between Unit1 and Unit 2 is my inclusion of my personal stance about the

subject analyzed. For example, on the first paper, I was very closed off in my analysis on the

material. Marginalized groups become marginalized because their interests are hard to be

understood by society. They are no different from other groups despite having interests that may

out of the ordinary I clearly do not provide more insight on why this is important or why their

interests are not understood by society. There is no further analysis on why this important or how

it can be remedied in the future. However, in my second paper which analyzed media bias

regarding Hillary Clintons email scandal, I was sure to provide my personal stance and why it

mattered in its context. "The main reason behind successful immigration should be painfully
obvious to even the most dimwitted of observers: Some groups of people are almost always

highly successful given only half a chance (Jews, Hindus/Sikhs and Chinese people, for

example), while others (Muslims, blacks and Roma, for instance) fare badly almost irrespective

of circumstances." Are her leaks supposed to be all positive to prove Hillary has nothing to hide

and that inside she really is a wholesome person? Clearly the Washington post knows their main

demographic are liberals and purposefully aim to put her in better light in a shitstorm of a

scandal. By stating what I believe the Washington Posts intention was, I am trying to create the

reasoning on why this is important and how it affects the readers opinion and ideas about the

news event. Through this change in my writing style, I formulate and articulate a stance in my

writing and generate lines of inquiry and search, collect, and select sources appropriate to their

writing project. In Unit 2, I also included different sources other than the Washington Post to

showcase the bias that is present in different news sites. Fox News eventually posting Email

scandal proves Hillary learned wrong lessons from Nixon and Watergate Every new update on

the event spurred on a frenzy of events which take allegation out of proportion. They

immediately compare her to Nixon because of his likely guiltiness, implying that she is a

comparable figure. The only difference is that Clinton was acquitted and Nixon resigned. Is

Hillary supposed to be drawn as similar simply because of allegations because it is abundantly

clear that one had to step down as president while the other was declared free of charges?

Through multiple sources that vary in appeal, style, and stance, I show that I am able to use

multiple forms of evidence to support my claims, ideas, and arguments and effectively use and

appropriately cite sources in their writing. I was able to apply these changes that I learned to my

revised essay for Unit 1 seen on my English Portfolio.

 Unit 3 was different from the previous essays. Using first person while writing about a

personal story, I was able to showcase other writing goals that I was able to improve and work

on. Through the multiple drafts that I posted online, I was able to have criticism and feedback on

what was good and bad. For example, James Erickson wrote on my first draft, Very good job

keeping the frame of age accurate. Everybody knows the tendencies of young teenagers, simply

because we have all at one point been a middle schooler. By incorporating the middle school

tendencies into your story, you keep alive the essence of truth and historic events while

explaining how things went down. Also, the fuel for you frustration is completely relatable, as

we have all been with those overly cocky, obnoxious players. Great job supporting the motives

and emotions of the characters with an appropriate setting and tone of middle school indecency.

I was able to build on this momentum and showcase more writing goals throughout the paper by

revising my writing using responses from others. A piece from my paper that I think best

represents this is How could one small Asian kid taking merit badges in Engineering and Public

Speaking cause a potential civil lawsuit from one family against his own? Well, I was not just

some ordinary skinny Asian Boy Scout. Oh no, I was an ordinary skinny Asian kid with a

fighting problem. The year before, I was suspended from school for fighting and constantly got

into arguments with my classmates. Now that school was out and I was not around kids my age,

there was no way I could get into trouble. Boy was I wrong. I aimed to create my style of

writing to be that of my middle school self which was boisterous. I tried to represent my

experience, perspective, and idea in conversation with the reader by asking rhetorical questions

in this excerpt. My Unit 3 paper was able to achieve writing goals by showcasing my

experiences through the criticism and feedback I received from my peers.

 I personally learned a lot this semester. Even though I do not think I am a stellar writer

yet, I believe that I was able to improve on many aspects and was able identify what I need to

improve on through this course. Compared to my peers, I think that I was near the bottom,

however through this course, I was able to show improvement shown in my papers in my

portfolio from Units 1 to 4. This shows the effort that was put into these papers and how I

wanted to improve my writing personally. I thoroughly enjoyed this semester and I hope to be

able to apply these lessons and goals learned in future discourses and endeavors that I may take

in the future.