Orellana 1

1336 Angelina Street

Pacoima, CA 91331
December 11, 2015
18111 Nordoff Street
Northridge, CA 91330
Dear reader,
Reflection

As my summer was coming to an end, my first semester of college was arriving faster
than I thought. The fact that I was going to be a college student was extremely nerve-racking. So
many thoughts were going through my head, such as: the professors, the difficulties of classes,
time management, and the amount of homework. Although, I was worried the most for my
English class because I have struggled in that subject throughout my four years of high school.
Writing papers and comprehending lectures was not my forte. So the thought of me taking an
English class in college for the first time was horrifying. I was putting myself in a predicament
that I was going to struggle through this course and I have not even started it. Fortunately, I was
rewarded with an amazing professor, Kimberly Lewis. Her teaching skills intrigued me so much
and I learned so much from her.
In addition, as the semester went by, I saw progression in my writing skills. The first
essay topic was based on language or a memory that revolves around language. This topic
grabbed my attention because I consider myself bilingual. I am fluent in English and Spanish.
Therefore, I knew writing this paper was going to be fairly easy. I decided to write about the
experiences I encountered throughout my childhood that assisted me in learning the Spanish
language fluently. I had no difficulty in writing the paper because it was something that has

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happened to me before it was just a matter of remembering the experiences I encountered and
writing them onto the paper.

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The second essay we had to write about was on visual rhetoric. Visual rhetoric is defined
as the description of visual images by an observation. This was an interesting topic because it
was the first time I was introduced to rhetoric in general. For this essay we had to go to any
restaurant that obtained a take out menu and sit there for an hour and observe the things around
me. I decided to take a visit to my local California Pizza Kitchen in Burbank. I had wrote so
much on my notebook about the things I was observing throughout the hour. Now that I had all
of my notes gathered, I just had to put together in an essay structure. Although, it also had to
consist of a lot of analyzation. So with everything I observed, I would have to analyze as well.
This essay was very beneficial because I learned something I had not learned before. Also, I
noticed that my writing was progressing because I was writing essays that pertained to
experiences of my life, rather than doing a book report.
The last and final paper was a research paper. We had to argue whether social media was
or was not affecting the old traditional face-to-face interaction. I argued that social media does
affect the old traditional face-to-face interaction. This research paper was interesting because it
had to do with all the social applications that I use in my personal life. Therefore, I just had to
write about my opinions on how it affects interaction. I learned so much from this essay because
we also learned about MLA citations and in-text citations. The way Professor Lewis taught us
MLA was very fun and helpful. We did several activities on how to do a work cited page.
As my first semester was coming to a conclusion, my class had multiple days of portfolio
workshops where we had to revise each others essays. Every paper had constructive criticism
written on it to fix it. The days of revisions were extremely helpful for me because I learned new
proofreading habits that can benefit me in the future with other papers. Overall, this class was

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nothing but a great learning experience. I improved my writing skills, sentence structures,
learned new things, and worked cooperatively in groups with my classmates.