Reflection

I began this second semester pretty confident since I flowed through the first semester of English Comp I with no trouble. Assuming the second semester would be the same. Boy was I wrong! I struggled writing and keeping up with all three essays as well as other assignments, but I learned a lot from this course. During the semester, I composed an argument essay and a rhetorical analysis essay under the theme social epidemics, specifically social media scams.

The first essay was about the social epidemic social media scams. I had to come up with solutions to this problem and research evidence to back up each solution. When searching website to website for evidence, Professor Elizabeth Hammett taught me and the class about primary, secondary, and tertiary sources, which helped me limit my search for sources. When citing my sources, we had to cite in APA format. I learned how to format the sources with hanging indentations for the reference page in alphabetical order. I also dealt with the challenge of page count. I needed more solutions to add on to the essay to reach the minimum required page count. However, what really helped fill up the page was block quotes. I used the block quote format on my longest quote which helped get me to four pages. 

The next essay was much harder on me. We learned about absurdism, and authors whose works fall under that theme. Then I needed to choose one of the absurd authors and connect my author's beliefs with my social epidemic. Professor Hammett suggested Kurt Vonnegut because of his beliefs on technology and progression which really connected well with my epidemic. Which led me on the path of researching who Kurt Vonnegut is. I learned a lot about the theme of  absurdism and why those authors believed and thought especially in their time period. When it came to finding quotes and evidence to support how Vonnegut would respond to social media scams, I struggled with finding enough evidence and where those quotes were originally from. I somehow found the original sources with some help from Professor Hammett. She also taught me that if I put the word “believe” then I wouldn't need evidence to support it because it would then become more of an opinion based essay. Which definitely helped with my essay and saved my time from searching for more evidence. 

All in all, I’ve learned so much important information and skills from this course that will greatly benefit my future essays. This class made me realize the immense amount of social epidemics there are around the world today, and so many that aren’t being dealt with. I enjoyed the many topics we discussed, the many skills we learned, and the writing challenges I learned to overcome. Thank you Professor Hammett for helping me become a better writer.