Angelica Garcia

April 24, 2022

Engl 1301- 205

Reflection Portfolio

Essays can be a daunting assignment to complete. We sometimes believe that the first

essay should be perfect. This caused me to be extremely scared when I was writing my first

essay in Engl 1301. I was scared that although it was a first-year writing class, it was still a

University course. This terrified me because I was thinking that the professor was expecting

perfection even in the first essay. However, one of our first assignments was to read an article

called “Shitty first drafts.” This helped me to calm my nerves down and when I read this article it

helped me realize that first drafts do not have to be perfect. When it came to writing my first

essay I just wrote my thoughts without giving much thought to the actual structure of the essay. I

later went back and made corrections based on the feedback I received from my peers and

professor. I was told to do more analysis on the essay. When I wrote my first essay instead of

analyzing the genre, I was analyzing it rhetorically and this caused conflicts when writing my

essay. I remember that in my article for my first essay “Animal Cruelty: What You Can Do Right

Now to Prevent It” I saw a cover photo in the background of the title. Behind the title was a

picture of an animal who looked like they had human characteristics. The animal looked tired,

sad, and seemed to have been abused. I wrote about this picture stating how the author was using

this to gain empathy from the reader. I was later informed from my professor that this was not

helpful to the assignment. My professor said I could use the same concept about the animal but

not the way I used it. The way I used it was being rhetorically. I decided to remove this section
of my essay because I did no want to mix rhetorical analysis with genre analysis. Instead, I

focused more on the written genre part of the article. I looked deeply into the parts of the article

that were written and tried my best to analyze what the author was trying to communicate to the

reader. My first essay was about animal cruelty and I tried my best to not give my opinion on the

topic. Animal cruelty is something I am completely against, and while I was reading the article, I

completely agreed with the author however I did not want to only look at her article from my

perspective but also from a neutral perspective. I tried to see what the author’s stance on the

topic was and if she accomplished what she was trying to explain to the reader. I had a difficult

time in choosing a type of genre to write about. In class we had an activity where each group got

a poster and tried to analyze that genre. The one my group got was pretty easy to analyze. It was

about covid- 19 and although it did not have many writings on it we were able to speak about it

quite a lot. I tried to choose a poster as well to write about and analyze however this was difficult

because the posters would not have much to write about because there was not enough writings

on it. The task was to analyze a written genre and there was not much evidence I could find from

posters. This essay can help me in my future courses when I am reading books that are required

for the class and I can analyze the content. It will not help me completely, but it will help me to

structure my essays. This first essay gave me an insight as to how university professors want

their essays structured and what is expected. In the revision I did not have much to fix since I

received a good grade on my final essay. I did not change much of the content in fear of ruining

my perfect score. I still revised some of my topic sentences to make the structure more cohesive

and for the sentences to flow naturally.

For the second essay we had to compare the same genres. I chose to compare websites

from universities. I chose Texas A&M International University, University of Texas Health
Science Center in Houston, and University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. I

compared these universities’ nursing programs. I researched each school and compared their

gpa’s, acceptance rate, and diversity standards. At the beginning of writing this essay I had a

difficulty narrowing down my topics. I tried to write about all three universities in a broad

spectrum and did not specify my thesis. When I spoke with my professor, she told me to narrow

down specifically what I was going to be writing about and not just write everything about each

university. I was also told that I needed to fix how I was comparing my communities. I would

write about one universities gpa, acceptance rate, and diversity standards and then I would

compare it to a university I had previously spoken about. I was informed that this might confuse

my audience. I decided to compare my communities a certain was. I wrote about each university

gpa, acceptance rate, and diversity standards and then I wrote about the other. I wrote about what

these topics meant and what they reveal about the university. This helped me in writing my essay

because it was not as confusing to the reader. In my last and final revision of the essay I fixed the

comparison of the essay and also tried to fix the thesis. In this new revision I tried to fix my

introduction and thesis statement more. I believe that they still needed more fixing to lead my

audience the right way. In changing these things I believe that I made the essay easier to read and

gave the reader a better understanding of what I am trying to talk about in the essay. Before these

revisions I think the audience might have had a hard time reading the essay and understanding

where the essay was leading and what I would talk about in it. The essay was also in a way

boring. Not everyone might want to read about nursing programs in universities. In this new

revision I tried to change the tone in the words I was using to make it friendlier to readers. That

was a challenge and a struggle I faced in writing this essay, I found it hard to make the essay

interesting for others to read so I would not loose the reader. I was also struggling with sentence
structure. One day in class the professor showed us a PowerPoint on how to organize our

paragraphs. This helped me in writing my essay. I wanted to include three topics for each

community, and I did not want the essay to look like it was jumping around. This day in class

helped me out a lot because I was able to understand how I could make my sentences flow from

topic to topic. In this next revision I fixed the transitions so the topics can transition from topic to

topic without loosing the reader. I had done that previously however I wanted to add transition

words to help the sentences transition smoothly. Although all of these new things I am being told

on how to structure my essay will help me in writing my future essays they might not help me

with other things in other courses. I will however be able to use this in comparing programs in

different schools if I choose to transfer schools. I will be able to look at these different websites

in other aspects that I normally would not look at.

In my third essay I was told to analyze a genre rhetorically, I chose the same article I

used in my first essay. This allowed me to remember what my first thoughts was in reading the

article and what I believed that the author was trying to express to the reader. When I first wrote

the essay, I simply wrote down my thoughts and did not think much about the structure or

making sure the audience understood what I was talking about in each of the paragraphs. After

speaking with my professor, I made my essay a lot more narrowed down and fixed my topic

sentences. In one lesson the professor made on how to structure a topic sentence I was able to

read my paragraphs and create a topic sentence that gave my students an insight as to what I was

going to speak about in that paragraph. I was also told that in my topic sentence I should write

about what rhetorical device I was going to be talking about and giving examples. I did that in

the revisions and made those changes for the final essay. In the new revision I also changed my

thesis statement. As I read the article, I realized that the author had used different forms of
rhetorical devices. I first believed that the author only used pathos to install emotion on the

reader and this was basically all that I wrote about in the essay. I read it more and noticed how

the author was also trying to use ethos to gain credibility however they failed to do so because

they did not have any evidence to back up their statements. She did use some creditable sources

to confuse the reader into thinking her words were factual. I decided to use this in my revision so

I could give my audience a different perspective and for them to not think that the author only

used one type of rhetorical device the entire article. At the start of each paragraph, I also added

in the types of rhetorical devices that I was going to be writing about in that paragraph. This

helped my topic sentence be stronger and will help my reader to understand what that paragraph

will be about.

I believe that some of my weaknesses this semester was in the overall structure of the

essay. I have always had a hard time in writing my essays and in starting my essays. This

evolved over the course of this semester. I am now able to say that I have a good understanding

of sentence structure and how to form my topic sentences and introduction. The hardest part in

doing this website and the portfolio is trying to make the website easy for users to navigate

through it. I also had a difficult time in fixing my essays. I believe there is always room for

improvement but when I submitted my final essays I believed that was the best I could have done

and when I was told I had to revise basically the whole context I struggled greatly doing so.

Nevertheless, I focused on ways to make this essay even better and tried to fix it so much that

there were not any errors. Another struggle I faced was that in my first essay I received a perfect

score. I was afraid of changing anything and ruining the content of it and having it affect my

grade. My identity changed in writing these essays and especially revising them because I
realized that even when you think you have done the best you possibly can there is always room

for improvement.