Self-reflection Essay PDF

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Student’s Name Professor Lanning ENG 100 4 April 2018 Self-reflection Essay Honestly, I am an international student who has lived in the US for roughly eight months so far and my major at CSU is Chemical Engineering. Therefore, English is not my forte and it is one of the things I struggle with when I study in the USA. Luckily, I have participated in the class ENG 100 of Professor Lanning and after this course, I have made great improvements in my English skills, especially reading and writting. During this course, there are many materials, typically in the form of articles, and most of them are pretty long ones. To understand clearly the contents of those articles and the viewpoints of authors, I have to read them carefully over and over again and translate a huge number of new words in each article into my language. The more I read, the more words I learned, and the better I am at reading. Moreover, there is an annotation assignment in the article "Mind Over Muscle" of David Brook which helped me to understand the main points in an article easily. As a result, after reading a lot of articles from the course and doing the annotation assignment, I am now more confident with my techniques to read, understand, analyze, and respond to expository and argumentative prose. Reading those articles, not only can I improve my reading skills, but I can also improve my writing skills. Without a doubt, in each country, there is a different writting style or the way to express an idea, and, obviously, there is a major difference in writting styles between the USA and Vietnam. By reading the articles, I could learn the way that American

people express their idea through words or sentences and I have applied what I learned to my essays. I believe that I meet one more course goal, which is techniques to write effective expository and argumentative prose. Throughout the course, there are three important assignments (Summary, Rhetorical Analysis, and Argumentative Synthesis) and a portfolio assignment. Before each assignment, my professor always gave us small exercises and praticing problems. Those excercises are mainly about how to write an introduction for an essay, how to develop an appropriate thesis statement, how to gain readers’ attention, and how to use quotes appropriately. Professor Lanning also helped us to make the paragraphs in an essay connected by providing many transition words or phrase. Therefore, I am now much better at developing a thesis or coherence, and making transitions among paragraphs in a piece of writting than before. I think I have effectively met three of the course goals. For the other goals such as choice of apporiate diction or revision, editing, and proofreading, I find myself still struggling with these parts compared to the other goals that I mentioned above. When I began the course, I was not really confident in writting because of the lack of vocabulary and the change from APA to MLA style. Last semester, I attended the class UST 206. In that course, the style that I used in every assignment was APA, therefore, I found it difficult to write an essay in MLA format the first time. For example, as far as I remembered, my first essay in this course is a response essay to the "Borm Church Activity". In this essay, I had to develop only a minimum two page response arguing for my action and explaining my reasoning. However, at that time, it took me more than a day to finish that short essay. The other example is my first assignment which is summarizing the article “The Culture of Shut Up” by Jon Lovett. My grade for that assignment was not really low but not as good as I expected either; the reason

is that I lost most of my points in “Assignment Specific Criteria” part which mainly focus on formatting an essay, how to use citation, and the works cited page. Fortunately, day by day, there was a big change in the way that I write and format an essay. My vocabulary is improved considerably which enables me to write an essay with my own words rather than using the quotes from the articles. Additionally, by reading the sample essays of other students, I am getting used to using MLA style in my essay. These can be seen as two turning points in my writing after this semester. The recent evidence for my improvements is that I got full points in the “Assignment Specific Criteria” part for the second assignment which is the Rhetorical Analysis Essay. Also, my total grade for that assignment was 10% higher than the first one. The bottom line is that after the course, I gained much more confidence in my writing skills than before. There are many factors that contribute to a good writer such as grammar, spelling, punctuation, developing an idea, a hook and a thesis statements, analyzing articles, constructing connected sentences in a paragraph and paragraphs in an essay, etc. Honestly, I am confident in developing an idea, building a hook to lead the readers to my topic, and anticipating audience expectation. In other words, when writing an essay, I usually quickly know what needs to be written and what the audience wants to know from reading my essay. Also, I usually think of a lot of ideas or various aspects of a problem to discuss in my essays. Thanks to that, my essays usually catch the readers’ attention; they also include many creative ideas and impressive examples. Interestingly, the work that I struggle with most when I write an essay is having so many ideas. Yes, that is true. Firstly, when I think of many ideas, I do not know how to organize them in an appropriate order in my essay. Secondly, I sometimes cannot express exactly my ideas by words and sentences due to the lack of vocabulary. Lastly, I sometimes put more information than needed in one essay, which makes the readers confused and makes it hard to absorb all of

them. When it comes to the part that I still need to improve, I believe all of aspects of my writing are not perfect which means that all of them still need improving. However, the most important part I want to improve is my vocabulary. English is not my native language; therefore, I need to enrich my vocabulary as much as I can. I believe that even if I am really good at other aspects in writing, without extensive vocabulary, I cannot write a good essay. In the portfolio assignments, I had to write an argumentative synthesis essay about the “Designer Babies” technology. In this assignment, I feel most confident with the introduction paragraph and my argumentative sections and I feel least confident with my conclusion. For the introduction, I have developed a hook leading the audience to the topic of my essay by using a question: “Many decades ago, could one have imagined that his kids might be able to be designed to have desirable traits or some beautiful features from parents such as a sharp nose or blue eyes?”. Then, I provide them with a straight answer: “At that time, these were only wishes, but now, with an advanced medical technology, those dreams can completely come true”. After that, I briefly introduce function of “designer babies” technology and two opposite aspects of the issue. My objective is giving readers some background to this topic. In the final part of the introduction, I have already shown my position on this problem by building a clear and concise thesis statement: “Although having designer babies seems to exert a positive effect on the future of society, the harm that this brings to human beings still outweighs the benefits.” I believe that after reading my introduction, with all factors above, the readers will know exactly what I am going to discuss in my essay. For my argumentative sections, I spent three paragraphs building my argument and offering supportive ideas to my thesis. I have established a controlling idea by drafting a topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph to clearly identify what will be discussed in each

one. In the first paragraph, I begin by pointing out my topic sentence: “It is hard to deny that genetic technology is a significant step in the history of human beings, however, the very first reason why “designer babies” technology is not recommended is that it causes potential harms to children and their parents”. Then, I gave a lot of evidences explaining why this technology “causes potential harms to children and their parents”. My supportive ideas are: “The process of changing an unborn baby’s DNA is very complicated and challenging” and this technology “may cause psychological effects on parents”. What I did for the second and third paragraph is totally similar to what I did with the first one. I am confident to say that argumentative sections are the strengths in my paper because each paragraph is well-developed with the unity among every sentence; the information in each one is organized in a clear and logical manner which helps the readers follow my development; and each paragraph clearly relates to my thesis statement. For the conclusion part, it seems to be the weakness in my paper. In my conclusion paragraph, I have already repeated my thesis statement: “In conclusion, although “designer babies” technology has some certain advantages, the drawbacks of this technology are more important to be concerned.”. Also, I provide some solutions to the disadvantages of the issue. However, there is too much new information presented at the end of my essay. Therefore, the readers may feel overloaded with the huge amount of information. Lastly, the reason that make me feel less confident with my conclusion is that I did not clearly give the readers anything to take away when my paper ends. Throughout my writing process, the aspects that developed the most are prewriting and drafting and my argumentative synthesis essay can be taken as a strong evidence for that growth. Before writing this essay, I had already set up clearly the layout of the essays, the main points for each paragraph, and the necessary quotes from my sources. With careful preparation, it was

much easier for me to finish the whole long essay and the most important thing is that I did not get lost in each paragraph. As you can clearly see, for each paragraph of my argumentative synthesis essay, there is only one main point with supportive ideas or evidence for that point. For the drafting part, I do not struggle to present my ideas by my own words and sentences anymore. The reason is that my lexical resource has developed by reading a lot of articles from class. The evidence for this is that I did not use a lot of quotes in my third assignment compared to the first one. Also, I am now able to organize my ideas in a suitable order, which creates the coherence and cohesion in my argumentative synthesis essay. As a writer, I have grown significantly throughout the semester. I have changed from a lazy writer who never used transition phrases among paragraphs and sentences to a writer who tries to use linking words to make the paper flow and check spelling and formatting before turning in my work. This is, undoubtedly, a big step forward in being successful during college. Writing this portfolio is such a meaningful thing to do at the end of the course. This portfolio helps me to look back at my English writing skills’ development throughout this course. It helps me to see what I have achieved and what I should improve as a college writer. Additionally, while revising my papers again to prepare the portfolio, I found out that in both my rhetorical analysis and argumentative synthesis paper, I had formatted the works cited more accurately than the summary essay. After this course, my goals will still be improving techniques to write an effective argumentative prose and choosing an appropriate diction and sentence structure. These are the aspects that I think still needs improving and I hope I can do it in the future....