During the arduous English 120 course, the focus involved intriguing topics of race, gender, and stereotypes in the media. Highlights included analyzing and summarizing a specific image advertisement and an article. The most entertaining assignment was the research paper which took about half the semester to complete. In contrast, to the research papers I had written in high school I never wrote an annotated bibliography before and the task of the assignment was different. The task involved identifying a social issue that occurs in media then create an argument surrounding it. The research project was a refreshing part of the course because it involved identity on controversial topics. One of the most difficult aspects of the course was focus and concision, especially while working on the writing exercises. …show more content…
When reading through a multitude of articles, a skill that needed to be honed was annotating. Asking questions and underlining important parts were things I already knew how to do. However, a tool of annotation that I did not utilize was identifying the structure of a paper. Learning how an article organized its paragraphs and highlighting the thesis was a tool that I learned to incorporate later on while researching articles and noticing which ones correlated with my paper. Identifying the thesis within an article helped me understand the meaning of a thesis in context to the whole paper. Along with understanding the use of a thesis learning how to create an effective one was also important. How to write the thesis for my papers was essential because it provides the main argument that the reader recognizes. The formula subject then claim and then organization provided a way to write my thesis with