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Rodman Villela

Professor Leigh Moore

Engl-1301-03

30 December 2017

Reflective Essay

The fall semester of 2017 was a challenge to me. It was my first time as a full-time

student and also, I decided to increase my hours of work from three to four days a week. This

challenged me above and beyond to manage my time effectively between college and work. This

spring semester, the course English-1301 was the most challenging course I have taken so far in

my college career. In my previous English classes, I had always struggled with writing in

general, but I had been able to succeed by putting in extra effort. The course of English-1301

was different. Not only it did make me put more efforts and time than my other three courses to

pass the class, but also make me find alternative ways to learn and fixes the mistakes in my

writing assignments. Nevertheless, the course of English-1301 has helped me improve my

effective writing communication skills by reducing the errors of fragments and grammars and

also how to find and use effective and reliable sources to back up my points in my essays.

My second short academic respond was the lower grade of my essays that I got in the

course and one of the major causes was fragments. Throughout my entire paper, there are at least

fourteen fragments in total. A good example of a fragment can be seen in the first sentence of the

paper, where I wrote, For the Short Academic Response Assignment number two. I decided to

schedule Sentences like this were scattered throughout my entire paper and looking back at it

makes me realize how horrendous it made my paper. My common mistake with the fragments

was that I put a period instead of a comma. Luckily, I was able to learn how to fix this mistake
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by attending writing tutoring sessions at the learning lab. As a result, my last two short academic

responds and my last two major essays had zero fragments.

Grammar errors were my most common mistake that I made in all my essays. This is

something that I have always and most likely will struggle with in my future writing

assignments. One of my main problems was not using the appropriate past, present, and future

form in a sentences. In other words, when I was making a point about an issue and it was in the

past tense, sometimes I wrote the verb of the sentence in present or even future form. However,

when I compare myself from the beginning of the semester to now, I can confidently say that my

grammar errors have reduced in my essays. This is because the course of English-1301 illustrates

to me my mistakes that I made in my papers, and I learned from them. As a result, in my last

three tutoring sessions when I went to check for grammar errors in my last essays, the tutor only

found a few word problems. Even though I still make grammar errors in my writing assignments,

I am happy with the progress I made in the course of English-1301.

Being able to effectively use the online database to find reliable and scholarly sources to

back up my arguments was one of the best techniques that I learned during English-1301. Before

this course, my first English course was Intr-w-0310 and during the course, I was introduced to

the online database. However, I was never able to use the website to the fullest, and every time I

tried, it was stressful. This is because every time I was looking for an article, there were

thousands of them and it was difficult to found that one the I needed. However, during English-

1301, I was able to learn how to properly use the online database and narrow down the articles to

find the perfect one. The results can be seen in my report essay assignment, where it got the

higher score of all my essays. One of the reasons was that the essay has strong and scholarly

articles that support my arguments.

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In this semester the course of English-1301 was stressful and difficult to me. However,

this challenge only helps me to become better at my writing communication skills. The course

taught me how to use the online database to its fullest and reduce the number of fragments and

grammar errors that I make on my essays.