Pellerito 1

Jack Pellerito

Marisa Enos

ENG.111.W02

19 April 2017

A Developing Student

Taking English 111 this semester has taught me a great deal about writing, and even more

so about critical thinking, critical reading, and academic conversations. Before this English class,

I had only taken high school English classes. They weren't extremely different, but the style of

the papers we would write were very different. There was no "academic audience" that I had to

be sure my papers were suitable for. There was no synthesis or explications. There were essays,

and there were specific types of essays like persuasive, informative, etc. However, through this

course I have learned a great deal about my own writing , the writings of others, and how to

improve my writings and make them suitable for academic audiences. The main things that I saw

improvements on in my writings were my ability to cite my sources in proper MLA style, my

ability to use the proper viewpoint in my essays, and my ability to find quotes that fit into my

writing.

The first problem I had in this class was citing things in MLA style properly. I was

familiar with this from high school but our classes had never been extremely strict on the format

as long as we did indeed cite our sources and show we were not simply plagiarizing. I had had a

few bigger, more important papers in which I had to properly cite my sources, but I did it

incorrectly without knowing it. This class had us use MLA Citation on all of our papers and so I

quickly learned that I kept doing it wrong. The main issue I had at first was remembering all of

the little things like page numbers, instructor's name, etc. However, I also struggled most with
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my work cited page. I kept making simple mistakes here that would ruin the entire work cited

page. For example, in my first Compare and Contrast essay, this was my entire work cited page

exactly as it was on the essay:

Works Cited

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Seabury Press, 1968

"Changing Education Paradigms". Ken Robinson. The RSA, 2010.

It is easy to see how bad this work cited page is immediately. First off, the second line is not

indented correctly as it should be. Secondly, I totally missed adding my other sources that I used

in this essay. I also did not add all of the information needed for citing the video by Ken

Robinson or the article by Paulo Freire. This citation page was pretty much a failure. However,

after this course I was able to learn how to properly create a citation page. From the AMS paper,

my first draft, here is a section of my work cited page:

Works Cited

Anderson, Monica. "Technology Device Ownership: 2015." Pew Research Center: Internet,
Science & Tech. Pew Research Center, 29 Oct. 2015. Web. 22 Mar. 2017.
Crawford, Matthew. "Attention as a Cultural Problem." Exploring Connections: Learning in the
21st Century. Pearson Education Inc., 2016. Pp. 36-48.
As is easily visible, the sources have all the correct information needed and the sources are

alphabetized and everything. From the start of this course, I could not properly cite sources at the

end of my paper. At the end of the paper, I could properly make a work cited page with all the

correct formatting and information.

On top of struggling with MLA citation in my essays, I also had problems using the

proper person in my essays. I kept repeatedly using second person or first person when I should

have been using third person. This took away from the essay because this went against the
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guidelines of the paper and also was not suitable for writing for an academic audience. It made

my papers seem as if I did not know how to write for an academic audience, which I didn't at the

beginning of the course. For example, from my first Compare and Contrast essay, I used the

following line saying "We need a new system of learning so that this is realized by more teachers

and they can take advantage of this instead of thinking their students are dumb." By using the

second person in this essay it made the essay sound much more unprofessional and not nearly as

intelligent as it could have had I used the proper person. By the later half of this course, I figured

things out and I would use the third person for all of my essays. For example, in my Schank vs.

Hooks Compare and Contrast essay, I used the proper person. The following line is taken from

this essay and uses the correct person, which is third: "whenever someone speaks, they always

have a mindset about the conversation or story being discussed." As is visible, this line, and this

essay, was in the third person. This is the proper person to be used for a writing for an academic

audience. I have been using only the third person in my essays since the first few times I missed

points for using the wrong person. This has made my writing much better.

Another area besides citation and the proper person that I improved on was choosing and

placing quotes in my papers. At the beginning, I would use quotes that did not quite make total

sense with my papers or my essays and so it would almost weaken my arguments instead of

backing them up. I would place quotes and take them out of context and they would just be

confusing to any reader. For example, a quote I placed in an essay about language crossing

ethnic and racial barriers was "when we select a particular skeleton from a political point of

view, we, most likely, will begin to believe the story we find ourselves telling"(Schank 133).

This quote doesn't have hardly any connection to the topic at all and doesn't fit the essay at all.

However, I improved my selection of quotes and my placement of them after this. In my second
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draft of my AMS paper I selected much better quotes. When talking of why college students

often struggle, I used this quote, "most first-year students are ill-prepared for the expectations of

the average college professor" (Leamnson 75). It fit much better for the context and the situation

and actually backed up my arguments. All of the quotes I now use as textual evidence actually fit

my essays and are not simply random quotes I throw into my essay.

Whether it be improvements in citation, improvements in writing for an academic

audience, improvements in my textual evidence selection, or any other improvement, English

111 has definitely helped my to improve my writing and my writing abilities and skills. Before

this class, I was a mediocre to bad writer. I understood the grammar and everything along those

lines fine, but when it came to some more in depth ideas, I struggled a bit. I learned from my

mistakes and I have become a much better writer because of this class. I have learned many

different things from this English class and the improvements in my writing are definitely

visible.