English Course Reflection

English has always been a strong subject of mine. I have written journals and stories on my own for as long as I can remember; I have also written various types of assignments and essays throughout my school years. Through this course, my writing knowledge has been expanded as I have encountered new writing techniques and genres as well as more fully developing and refining aspects of my writing. The areas in which I most improved as a result of English 105 are annotated bibliographies, research writing, and descriptive writing. One of the areas in which my writing knowledge has been expanded is annotated bibliographies. Having never done one, I was at a loss my first time around. Although my final product had some errors (not in alphabetical

In this course, I learned how collect information that would be helpful for my research paper and how to explain it in layman's terms. Initially I viewed research as something that would be dull and boring, but I realized that this is not always the case. In fact, one very important (but unexpected) aspect of research writing that I learned from this course is persuasiveness and how to combine word choice in a way that keeps the interest of the reader while still adequately informing. Another facet of writing research papers that I learned from English 105 was how to paraphrase or quote articles to compliment and support the point I wanted to make in my paper. These paraphrases or quotes could not be done without in-text citations, which I was unsure about before this semester. Research writing as a whole was foreign to me, but because of the content that we went over I have not only learned how to write a solid, persuasive research paper but also how to use in-text citations to back it up. A topic that I was more familiar with than research writing, but still had room to grow in writing

I have always enjoyed writing descriptively and choosing words that paint a picture, which was something I would have considered as one of my strong suits. In the class I learned that descriptive writing is an area where I still had room to improve. As a writer, I enjoy engaging the reader. From other classes, I learned to leave enough space in my writing for the reader to interpret things and draw some of their own conclusions, rather than spelling it out for them. I approached my descriptive writing in that same style. What I learned in this class is that more detail does not take away from my paper but instead allows the readers to see the picture that I wanted them to see all along. One example is in the visual analysis essay when I was describing a fashion show that had a hill of flowers in the background. I left out some details that would have alerted the reader to the fact that the hill was a real, hand-crafted indoor garden and not just a decoration or wall-decal. Being more detailed in my descriptive writing for this class initially felt confining, because I thought it was taking away from the writing style and wording that I was used to. What I've discovered is that it actually gives me more word choice to paint even more vivid pictures than the vague ones I had painted