Reflective essay

The Reflective Essay
Since joining the class and over the last semester, I have been pursuing English as a subject consequently learning the importance of brainstorming, aspects of organizing prior to writing, revising and collaborating in writing. The subject has provided a gateway through which I have learnt the art of expressing myself, literature, grammar as well as the language itself. However, this did not come without its challenges. English being my second language, it took me a while to learn the ropes and comprehend the language as well as writing it.
The English subject has endowed me with organization skills in the art of essay writing through imparting the use of thesis statements, topic sentences, introduction and conclusion paragraphs; as well as coherence techniques. Thesis statements are introductory statements at the beginning of the essay with the information aimed at guiding the reader on what the essay is on and the scope it aims to cover. A topic sentence is found at the beginning of a paragraph and encompasses points to be covered in the entire body of the paragraph. I learnt the important of coherence techniques in organizing as it arranges ideas into a logical and systematic order for example through the use of transitional terms as in the statement: The English language firstly teaches organization skills, secondly, grammar and finally sentence structure. In this case, transitional terms ‘firstly’, ‘secondly ‘and ‘finally’ have been used for coherence. I was also able to learn how to use the introductory and conclusion sentences in writing; where I learnt that introduction sentences are used to introduce the stem ideas in an essay while a conclusion statement is used for providing a summary of all the ideas that have been explained in the essay.
Development skills were also impacted whereby the use of specific details and use of explanation in stories as evidence to support the statements was learnt. The details and the evidence together with the examples provide a basis for the development of an idea with the evidence being clearly introduced and its source being indicated. It may be followed up by an explanation or evaluative statement to further support the argument.
As I participated in this class, I got a chance to sharpen my skills in the MLA citation technique that comprises in-text citation and bibliography. An example of in-text citation: Achilles is described as “wolf, a violator of every law of gods and men,” (Malouf, 58) with the work cited as Malouf, David.Ransom.Knopf: Random House, 2009.Print.The use of quotations which are similar to the initial source of the statement can also be applied but should be attributed to the author though paraphrasing which can also be used involves putting a statement extract in your own words. The provision of credentials of experts cited is also a necessity in the citations. Learning the subject gave me an opportunity to explore into other areas of research such as the internet. The website can be used as a source of current and up to date information. Use of website references ought to also be stated in the references including the complete address for the site. The use local databases have also been helpful in providing access to reliable and verified scholarly articles and journals.
As I look back on my graded essays, I realized that sentence grammar and sentence construction proved to be a challenge being a source of most of my errors. The errors mostly appeared as sentence structures majorly comprising of run-on sentences. A run-on is a sentence comprising several main clauses that can stand as their own independent clauses but are strung together with improper punctuation appearing as a single sentence. An example: The student understood the presentation well (independent clause) the teacher was impressed (independent clause).The two can form a run-on statement: The student understood the presentation well the teacher was impressed. This can be corrected through the use of appropriate punctuation as: The student understood the presentation well. The teacher was impressed. I am impressed that throughout my semester I have shown progressive improvement in eliminating the errors.
I look forward to joining the English 1A class and I feel that I am ready to be successful in the class as it aims to enable students communicate effectively by emphasizing the importance of analytical reading and writing. I also believe that this class will enable me obtain different skills of writing from pre-writing, organizing, writing, revising and editing; all of which I have been introduced to in this class thus providing a solid foundation to learning English.