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Flora Sedrakyan

Professor Batty

English 102

12 December 2018

Song Analysis Essay Reflection

This was the first essay that I wrote in Professor Batty’s English 102 class, and I thought

it was one of the greatest essays that I wrote so far. Not only was the essay informative and

provided reader’s with a more concrete understanding of the song’s meaning, but it was

empowering and resonated a beautiful message to women. However, like many first drafts, it

was filled with numerous mistakes, some that I didn’t even notice were present in the essay until

people started to point them out. One of the first issues found right in the beginning of the essay

was the thesis. It wasn’t as clear as I hoped for it to be, which could have caused readers to

misinterpret the purpose of the essay. Aside from the thesis being unclear, some of the poetic

devices I used to analyze the song were not the correct poetic devices I intended to mention and

use. For instance, in the first body paragraph, I stated that Harvey Keitel asked Beyoncé a

rhetorical question when he in fact did not. He simply just asked her a question, but Beyoncé’s

response to that question can be interpreted in many forms, because of it’s irony. Other than

these major mistakes, the essay contained minor flaws, which include grammatical and

syntactical error, as well as formatting issues. The grammar was simple to fix, because I had my

friends and peers help detect such flaws, but formatting the essay so the lyrics take up less room

was difficult. There was a lot of lyrics from verses that I wanted to include, but I had to decide
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which three lines of the verses were the most impactful and helped advocate the purpose of my

essay.