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John Vincent Saulan

California State University Northridge Professor Florian
English 114B
7 May 2014
My Reflection and Experiences in English 114B
The second semester of this English course has surely been beneficial on approaching
university-level writing and pushing my capabilities as a collegiate student. I explored a vast
array of topics during this semester that bolstered my experience and growth as a writer. I was
prompted with persuasive and argumentative topics that exercised my cognitive thinking as well
as properly expressing emotion and facts in my papers. I have certainly learned a substantial
amount in this course, not just from mandatory classwork, but also from the discussions between
my peers about our own opinions and ideas on the assigned readings and essays. Without a
doubt, I immensely improved my writing skills throughout the semester that could certainly be
valuable for my college career and beyond.
The travel assignment project that I was assigned early in the semester definitely sparked
my creativeness on writing a persuasive letter to a place that I have never been before. I picked
England, a country that I have always desired to visit, and explicated on my research and my
persuasive letter about it that could surely convince anyone to travel to England. I used my
knowledge of ethos, pathos, and logos to create strong arguments without sounding too biased or
aggressive in my writing. I did have minor problems on the structure of some of my sentences
that sounded too wordy and at times excessive, but I attained my mistakes in future essays.
Another assignment that I found helpful on exploring my writing capabilities was the
Utopia research paper. I had to connect the ideas of Utopia by Sir Thomas Moore to a modern
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concept, which greatly interested me. I was definitely passionate about this topic in which I made
connections to Nazism and its goals for a utopian society. This research paper was certainly not
an easy task as it challenged my knowledge about creating a strong argumentative paper with
explicit connections to the prompt and to my own ideas.
This research paper required three drafts before it could be finalized since every student
in the class must recognize the purpose of their research and clearly state all topic sentences. I
noticed some mistakes in my second draft in which some sentences and word choices were
confusing to understand, with the last third half of paper feeling disconnected to the main idea.
With further revision and feedback from my peers and professor, the final draft of my Utopia
research paper ended up becoming one of my finest works, if not the best, in this course. I just
followed their advice and my persistent attention to detail that has constantly been beneficial to
my progress in writing.
Much like the first semester of my English course, I truly believe that I have become a
much better writer throughout my second semester of college due to my desire to improve. I used
that passion for knowledge to fully express myself and my ideas through writing. I will continue
to apply the knowledge and experience from this course in my future studies.