Alan Jean-Pierre

English 101/101W
Professor Rosenberg
28 April 2016
Reflective Letter
This semester in English 101 Ive learned many things about writing letters, essays, and a
rhetorical analysis. Writing a rhetorical analysis on a Gap Year was interesting and was full of
insight that I did not know about. Being that this was my first time writing a rhetorical analysis I
learned many things that was needed to construct one. I learned that a rhetorical analysis consists
of identifying the purpose and message of an image that the author is trying to get across to the
reader. I also learned the meaning of the call to write which is the authors reason for creating
an image. I also learned a bit of vocabulary like ethos, pathos, and logos, to enhance my speech
and understanding things in a multimodal text. These vocabulary words were needed to complete
many essays and papers to complete the class, it made me think about my assignment differently
because I would have to find ways to incorporate these words with my topic. This will help with
future papers and assignments because it made me really think and asses my topic. Also it made
me analyze the context by finding out who the author was, why he made the image of video or
article, what his goal was, and what groups of people are and are not the intended audience.
Another two essays written during this semester was our persuasive letter that was
written to a specific audience and the other paper was a midterm persuasive essay with a source
to support my argued opinion. Though a persuasive letter is required in all levels of schooling, I
learned in English 101/101W that people who write persuasive letters pay attention to audience,
tone, purpose, and the situation. The persuasive letter was a bit different than other letters that I
have written in the past because it focused mainly on what I tried to get the reader to focus on

which was my main idea of schools speaking broadly about a gap year and enabling students to
take it. In this letter I had to incorporate the issue into the letter and tell the reader how Im
knowledgeable for the topic that I wrote. The most difficult part of the latter was to find
somebody to write to. Some topics are harder than others and the harder it may get the harder it
may be to find who to contact when writing the letter.
Out of all the papers that Ive written in this class I thought jokingly how this one was the
easiest. But the type of assignment that came natural to me was the persuasive letter I did. I liked
the rhetorical analysis because it was very engaging when it came to doing the survey and
gathering up the information.
Overall the class was very useful and insightful. I now know some of my strengths like
gathering the information and knowing what exactly to look for. Some of my weaknesses would
be comma splices and sentence fragments, also I could use a bit of help with quoting the author
properly and placing the quote where it should be.