Nazaryan 1

Allen Nazaryan
Professor Kimberly Lewis
English 114A
12 December 2014
Reflective Preface
As an incoming freshman at California State University Northridge, I have adapted,
grown, and matured into an independent college student. Leaving my high school days behind
me, I took the aspects of collage life, and molded into my person thus creating the current
student I am. One of my classes, however, has helped shaped me the most out of all my classes
to prepare me for future courses, that course being English 114A.
Prior to arriving to college, I always knew that I has potential to be a great writer because
I was naturally gifted in the subjects of reading and writing. The course English 114A, with the
help of my professor, highlighted my writing abilities and helped me to focus on which flaws in
my writing to improve on. With three divided progressions in the class, being progression one,
progression two, and progression 3, I was given the chance to write essays in an evenly divided
schedule in which I can revisit my previous, and see how much I was improving. With the ability
to see all the work I had written months ago, I was basically given firsthand accounts to see
exactly where and how much I was improving. I got the chance to witness the evolution of my
essays over time and saw how the differences of the choice of vocabulary, grammar, and
citations were back then compared to today.

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In the first progression the essay topic was fairly simple. We had to write about a
personal encounter or reminisce on a piece of memory that had to do with food. For this food
narrative assignment, I decided that I would talk about my childhood experience with food
poisoning due to eating at McDonalds. I knew how to write essays but I had to take into
consideration that this was not more of an essay, but rather a story about an encounter that I had
with food. I wrote it in an essay dialect rather than in a way of telling a story so that was my first
mistake. My other major mistake was that I did not know how to write a proper conclusion. I was
not brushing up on the topic of the essay, and I was leaving vital bits and pieces off of the
conclusion, leaving the reader with many questions in their mind. After many peer reviews,
meetings with my professor, LRC visits, and two more essays, I was given to ability to go back
and change things about my essay and see what I was not doing correctly. Just the fact of seeing
my own mistakes better over the course of the semester, proves to me that I have learned which
way of writing is acceptable and which is not.
In the second progression, the essay closing the progression was an ethnography to be
conducted. I conducted my ethnography at two different McDonald's locations to see what type
of people eat there. Writing my results down on the essay, I failed to add analytical details in the
paper that was a key part of the ethnography. What I did was gathered all the information I had
acquired and just transfer it on a word document, making my essay a painstaking chore to read.
Getting feedback or learning how to work with description and analytical evidence, I saw the
flaws of my essay and I went back and re-added the analysis and the details it was missing.
After adding the parts of the essay that I was missing, I submitted the assignment and
received a positive grade out of it. Just like in progression one, I was able to see what I was
doing wrong and missing, then I went back and re-added all the detail that needed to be covered

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and that is how I believe I became a better writer. Taking this course and with the help of these
organized progressions really improved me as a writer and I can see the exact timely presses of
me improving as one.