Commitment and Practice to Improve Academic Writing Skills
This reflective analysis will help you reflect on yourself as a writer, the changes in your attitude to writing (if any), and the progress you made in ENGL 102. Use these questions to guide you: What did I hope to accomplish in these class projects? How did I grow as a person, a writer, as a researcher? What evidence do I have to show that growth? How does this growth prepare me for what is next?
Minimal length: 400-500 words
Your Reflective Analysis should accomplish four tasks:
It should make an evidence-based argument about your writing development.
It should use artifacts of your own writing as evidence for your argument. Specifically:
1 major project from 102
2 informal writings from 102
Any other supporting artifacts you would like to use such as Draft 1 Project 2.
Write about your own writing. It should do “meta-analysis” of those artifacts as it makes its argument.
It should be directed to a specific audience: Professional employer, friend, teacher, parent or guardian, future child, yourself…you choose. The format should fit the audience.
Citing Your Own Writing:
In your Reflective Analysis, you should provide proper in-text citation of your sources, just as you would with any other source in a composition; so, you’ll be citing yourself. Here is an example:
In my frst project for English 102, I discuss the impact of drafting on my writing development: “I have always drafted because I have been required to. But I really wanted to reflect analytically on how the process of drafting actually impacted my overall writing development. Was I becoming a ‘better’ writer?” (“Drafting and Development” 1).
Additionally, you should include full citations in a Works Cited. Here’s how:
Works Cited
Last name, First name. “Title of Project.” Course Title. Professor ______ _______. Department,
Institution. Date project was submitted. Form of Media (Print, Web, etc.).
(*** "Title of Project" should match with the in-text citation.)
Keep in Mind
Your reflection is not a place to try to make your professor feel good about your growth as a writer; it is a space for your honest reflection about you and your own work.
The project is group project.
Reflective Essay
Name
Institutional Affiliation
Reflective Essay
Writing is a process and one that requires consistent development and growth in order to produce high-quality work consistently. This is especially the case in academic writing, where it is critical to develop one’s writing skills. Developing one’s writing skills is aimed at ensuring that individuals can articulately communicate the information they plan on disseminating in a brief, concise, and engaging manner. In this way, it becomes possible to communicate even typically dull topics in an insightful manner. However, as I have come to understand, growing one’s writing skills is a process, and one that requires commitment and practice at that.
This can be clearly observed in some of the class projects that I have undertaken, and particularly so in the ‘euthanasia’ and ‘advertisement analysis’ projects. In both of these projects, I believe that there were significant differences in the drafts and the final copies submitted for the projects. This was based on the fact that I consistently had to review and revise my own writing in order to pass across the intended message in the most engaging and insightful way that I could think of, which called for honest self-assessment of my writing. For instance, I felt that the first draft of my advertisement analysis project was too simplistic and not engaging enough (“Draft 1”). This is why in the second draft I made it a point to include more relevant pictures as well as alter the description of the advertisement from a rote description of every scene of the advertisement in draft 1 to a more engaging and analytical description in the second draft (“Draft 2”).
The same trajectory can be observed in the ‘euthanasia’ project which is significantly different insofar as the first and second drafts are concerned. For instance, the first draft was significantly brief, cited a few authors, and provided a superficial argument of why ...