Tiana Philippe

Reflection #1 Abortion
URI Writing 104

The first benchmark of the semester that was assigned to us by Ms. James was in the
form of an investigative essay and we had to pick a controversial topic that the whole class
agreed on because we all had to work together. Since the majority of the class decided to do it on
abortion and the minority chose vaccinations, we ended up doing abortion because there was so
much to work off of. Although, because abortion is talked about a lot, we had to bring a different
perspective to the situation unlike other sites that take the same approach.
This essay took two weeks to complete, a week for the rough draft and the second week
for the final draft. We mostly worked at home on a shared document, but we were given a few
days to work on it in class with the help of the teacher. There is a total of eight people in my class
so our group was small compared to the bigger classes who had seventeen students. Although it
was easier to work together because it was a smaller group, half of the group didnt carry their
weight and so the other half was left to do all the work and it was very frustrating. Plus, there
was a lack of communication between everybody which got many frustrated and everybody
wanted their ideas included when it wasnt realistic. Also, no one knew how to create an essay in
the format of an investigative essay. Those were the most challenging part of this benchmark.
The easiest part of this benchmark was doing the final draft because we already had everything
done and only a few of us did it. The easiest part of doing this project was editing it because most
of the work is already done.
When we first started the essay, we were going to do it in a form of a story and have the
research that we did inside the story. That didnt work out and the teacher graded it as a fail. So,

we took a different approach. We had less story and more research; in fact, we didnt even have a
story. We talked about how different people viewed it in their perspectives and the evidence of
why each believed what they did. Each student was assigned with a task and I was in charge of
editing the paper, but I also took a part of writing the paper with Ariana Grenier and Samantha
Souza. I did not end up completing my part because there was so many tasks that were
unfinished from the other students so Ariana Grenier took it upon herself to finish editing the
paper. In the writing, we made sure we met the readers need by using the persuasive appeals
(ethos, logos, and pathos) throughout the paper.
Angela Rossner and Keisha Parra was responsible for conducting the research, but they
didnt provide us with much so Ariana Grenier and Samantha Souza did the research and writing.
The sites that were used could be trusted because the URL either was a .gov, .org or .com site.
They looked at a lot of doctors research and evidence and what they concluded on whether or not
a fetus was alive or not.
As the class progressed, I realized how much we grew from this first essay. We had little
professional experience writing college essays and when I look back at this paper, I realize how
much I did not know. Even though a lot of effort and stress was put into this, I think we deserved
that 80 because it definitely wasnt the best we could of done. Our first benchmark was an
investigative report on abortion and it was the most frustrating one out of the four.