Natalie Sandridge
Professor Hammett
English 1302
2 May 2023
Reflective Essay
Reflective Essay
I began this class the second semester of my junior year, after taking Composition I during the first semester. I came into this class confident in my skills I had learned during Composition I, however I quickly realized those abilities wouldn’t help me all that much. My Composition I class was purely based on rhetorical analysis of several different documents. Yes, I created an argumentative essay for which techniques authors used in their writing and why they were important, but I never built my own argument with my own sources, and there were no works cited pages needed. I discovered that while I could create the argument, I could not find good sources to support my argument. The massive sigh of relief I had when I saw that sources were optional for this reflective essay proves how much of an issue this continued to be.
For the first essay I was required to write for this class, I actually received a good grade and relatively good feedback for. The essay was a research essay for solutions to a chosen social epidemic. My social epidemic was hustle culture. Surprisingly, I found a multitude of official studies and research done on hustle culture and how it formed. I had good information for how it was created and how it functions, so creating solutions in my brain was not difficult. The difficulty came with finding research on those solutions. I could find some research on having hobbies and setting boundaries, but I struggled to confidently connect these to my topic. Because my argument was strong and I had a good understanding of hustle culture, I was able to scrape by with the bare minimum sources needed. Still good, but a close call.
The project two essay, however, was a disaster. Trying to connect a fairly recent epidemic that came out of social media to a fiction writer that lived one hundred years ago proved extremely complicated. I also chose the most complicated person to exist, Franz Kafka. I struggled with creating my argument for what he would believe about hustle culture, which made finding good sources impossible. I read multiple articles trying to piece together some evidence but I could not do it. Eventually, I gave up and only put in quotes just to put them in there. They provided no actual support for my argument, or lack thereof, but I turned it in anyway. As expected, I did not receive good feedback. Fail.
Although I did not directly improve during this class, I was made aware of my weaknesses, which is greatly beneficial for later improvement. In the future, I hope to be able to not only create strong arguments, but also find and properly connect sources to my evidence so I can better myself as a writer and researcher.
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