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William Bandt

Professor Beadle

University Writing 115

4 December 2019

Reflection

Taking English 115 has caused me to grow more as a writer in one semester than any

previous year of education. Through all of the exercises and more importantly, the outlines,

proposals, and drafts I have learned how to write much better. I now am more aware of how I am

presenting my argument through the thesis and the evidence I use. Length, being one of my

weaknesses has been developed more and more through the projects space, text, and media.

Throughout writing project space, I encountered many different issues.One of these being

the fact that I kept losing track of my argument and I was not allowing my essay to support the

thesis. Once I began writing the body paragraphs, my writing would stray further and further

from the original thesis. After my essay was reviewed by peers, this all came to my attention and

I tried my best to tackle it. I took all of my peers critiques into consideration and reviewed the

essay over myself. I then rephrased most of the paragraphs to fit better within the argument I

presented with the thesis. This experience caused me to become more aware of not only what I

am writing, but more importantly, why I am writing it.

After writing project space, I seemed to have a better grasp on supporting my thesis, but

in writing project text arose a new weakness. This weakness was in my ability to reach the page

requirement. After writing everything I thought I needed to and adding in extra details for

support, I was still a page under the requirement. I thought that my best option might be to bring
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my essay to the Learning Resource Center in the library and have a tutor look at it. The tutor

gave me the idea of taking a few steps back and looking at the general outline and format I was

writing in. He showed me that if I changed the main ideas of my body paragraphs then I could

make room for more paragraphs, which means a longer essay length. I took this tip back to my

home and reworked my essay as he suggested. I then met the page requirement much easier and

had a better developed essay. With this knowledge I will now be able to produce both quality and

quantity in my future essays.

The third and final essay of the semester, project media, was much simpler for me than

the first two. This is not only due to the growth and practice that I had gone through but I was

also writing on a topic that I enjoyed. Once I learned that we could write project media about a

film, I became very excited and any stress of the upcoming essay was relieved. This is because I

have a small passion for filmmaking and I knew that I could use it to my advantage. Being

someone who has seen such a great number of movies, I had many options but I immediately

knew that ​2001: A Space Odyssey ​would be my choice as ive studied it many times and I know it

has multiple layers with different meanings. With all this in mind I doubled the word count

requirement for the outline and I finished the final draft with ease. This essay taught me that it's a

very good strategy to write about something that I have an interest or passion in, when

applicable, because it makes the task much more fun and much easier.

It seems that with each assignment and each essay, I learned something about myself as a

writer. Whether it was a weakness that I needed to improve upon or a strength that I could

exploit, it caused me to grow. Learning to write clearly and in support of the thesis, longer
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essays, and to write with passion has prepared me for my next semester of writing classes and all

the essays to come.