English 101 Reflective Essay

English 101 has taught me a lot on how to take ideas and organize them into a proper essay. I used to struggle greatly because I would always just dive right into an essay without any prior preparation. However, the prewriting process that we discussed in class made it relatively easier for me to organize my thoughts. This essay will be an explanation of my essay’s strengths, weaknesses, and use of the writing process. First, I’ll explain my use of the writing process. Before writing, I write all ideas and gathered information on one paper. Next, I try and organize the relevant information together in an outline. This step also helps me decide on what information I want to include from the prewriting. Afterwards, I expand the outline into a rough draft, keeping the layout that I had in the outline, but with full sentences instead of ideas. Lastly, I go through the draft and edit out any grammatical errors or unusual phrasing. This process helps me by splitting up the steps taken to write an essay. It separates the process of gathering information, organizing it, and refining it into multiple steps so I only have to deal with one at a time. This is much easier than attempting to do every step at the same time by beginning your writing and finding

I don’t feel like much of my writing has any particular strengths, but I believe that punctuation and grammar are some things I get right in my essays. One thing I always try to do is to match verb tenses when listing actions. For example, both of my theses in the revised essays have matching verb tenses. The cause and effect thesis has each verb in the past tense while the persuasion thesis has all verbs in present tense. Another example can be found in the introduction paragraph of the cause and effect essay, “Since the beginning of human history, people would survive by living in relatively small groups, hunting animals for food, and foraging wild plants and