Mid-Term Reflection 

During the first six weeks of this course, I personally have learned a ton in the class. I am saying that because of the research essay that we had to write about, I felt pretty confident about the essay I decided to write about. That confidence that I had was due to the lessons previous to the research that I had to do. Different things that we learned like rhetorical situations, author, audience, tone, purpose, stance, language, genre, and medium are some lessons that are not that far from what we learned in high school, but the way we put them together in one essay to be able to explain our point using them was way different than how we used them in high school. Before taking this course I didn’t really pay that much attention to the genre and tone, but after taking this course I now can say that they play a really important job in an essay, because the genre is important and helps organize information so that we can more easily make sense of what the audience is about to read and tone is important because It delivers a certain message from you as the author and has a specific effect on the reader. During the research, the different words that we studied were the main focus while I was reading the different articles picked for research. Doing that helped me write a more organized and understandable essay. It made the research much more interesting because you had to go “deep” into whatever the message of the article was.

---

Post-Essay Reflection

In the most recent essay, I chose to talk about Global Warming and its effects on the environment, by writing an informative essay about it. The audience that I focused on in the essay was anyone that was interested in learning about the effects and how they can help prevent the damage being done to the planet. By setting a broader audience it was a bit more difficult to write an informational essay that would keep the audience entertained. This was a good challenge while writing the essay because this meant that I had to do more research and find out how different people reacted to the Global Warming topics and researches that were already out. While writing the essay I also focused on the people that thought that Global Warming was a “myth” and stated some pretty good points and statistics as to why it was not a myth and what we all had to do in order to prevent further damage.

I have learned a lot of things that I had no knowledge of before taking this class. Before taking this class I didn’t really pay much attention to the audience, genre, language, and tone. Before I would just research and basically just “fuzz” the different things into an essay. But after taking this class I can clearly see the difference in essay writing. I can see how audience, genre, language, and tone have a huge impact and have to be clearly identified while writing the essay. And having to write these long-page essays has helped me want to do much more research than on any other essay that I’ve written in the past.

The whole process of writing these essays was a very good way of precisely picking,  evaluating, and researching the topic. Also the peer review and the opinions on how to improve also helped me write a good essay because this gave me a different perspective on how to go about the essay.

---

Final reflection

Taking this class has helped me improve my writing and reading skills, by reviewing everything that I had done. The reviews and repetitive work done in class have helped me find and fix my mistakes. I’m now much more confident in my essay writing because of this class and the teacher. I had to learn a lot of rhetorical terms such as rhetorical situations, author, audience, tone, purpose, stance, language, genre, etc. Two of the most important ones that I think focusing on would be helpful are the audience and tone. I’ve noticed that from the start ( First Draft ) till the end ( The Final Draft ), the more I’ve focused on those two, I have been able to “understand” how to compose an essay. This could also be used in real life because tone can help you understand the way someone talks and the audience can help you understand much better the exact group you should focus on. But these two, in particular, are not the only ones that make up the essay so I focus on all the other concepts that we studied to be able to articulate a great essay with a clear understanding for my readers. I will continue to use this knowledge in my future writing. The practice done in class has helped me pay attention to all the parts of essay writing. Using this focus in the future will definitely help me, but there is always room for improvement, and I will try to “perfect” it as time goes by.