Vasquez 1

Alex Vasquez

Professor Jon Beadle

English 115

7 May 2019

2019 Spring Semester Reflection Essay

This semester has been enlightening. I realized that learning and perfecting computer

language ARM assembly is going to be a challenge for me. There are individual professors at

CSUN that were difficult to learn from. Additionally, I still need to learn to control my emotions

when I am in stressful situations because there have been moments throughout the semester

where I just wanted to scream and break a few things. These are not moments to be proud of, I

kind of ashamed that I almost slipped, and in the future, I hope to be able to say calmer.

One thing I can say with pride is that my writing skills have improved since the last time

I took English. Before taking English, I was more prideful than I am now. I wouldn’t seek out

help when working on an essay, I would feel offended when asking for help at the LRC because

I felt like they were insulting my work. The biggest problem I continue to experience is my

laziness. I believe for a few essays I have written in the past I would wait until the last minute to

work on it and receive a passable grade. I still failed the class so that strategy was not the best.

Now my attitude has improved since then so I’m not as lazy, but it is still a problem when

focusing on my assignments. But you can see my effort in my revisions for Project Space and

Project Text. I do not include Project Media for my efforts as it was the worst out of the three.
 Vasquez 2

Project Space is where you can see how much I have changed. The draft I turned in for

the final was for lack of better words, passable. My ideas were on the paper but the problem I

had was going in depth about them. Two of the body paragraphs lack any explanation for what I

had written, making them sound like I was iterating incomplete thoughts. Confusing me when I

went back to revise Project Space. They also lost track of the prompt pushing them further than

what was asked for. So, the first thing I did was to restructure the body paragraphs to be

comprehensible. I gave proper explanations for the paragraph, updating them so they can

reinforce my thesis for Project Space. And I made sure that every sentence I wrote was essential

for my thesis. Now my revised draft can be read and graded for the work it was supposed to be.

For Project Text the problems were similar. I would give my thesis and back my position

by using examples from the book The Metamorphosis. But the for half of the body paragraphs I

didn’t give proper explanations as to why I chose my examples. The other problem that occurred

was that I lacked a refutation for the counter argument. The explanations were taken care of the

same way Project Space was dealt with. My main concern was with the refutation. Since I didn’t

have one for the graded draft, I had to create one from scratch. It was more difficult than I had

imagined. I had to make sure the refutation backed the thesis, so it didn’t sound like I was trying

to refute something that was true.

I would have to say my main problem I had throughout all the essays was Grammar. In

each of my drafts there were parts of my sentences that didn’t make any sense until you read it

three or four times. I will have to proofread each of my drafts when I am done and get somebody

to read my essay after me to pick up any errors that I may have missed. But now I am self-aware

of my problems so I can pick up on my problems the next time I write and create a paper that I

will be proud of when someone reads it.