Jenaya McGee

Mid Term In-Class Reflective Essay

For the first writing assignment, writers identity, we were to write about our
experiences with writing. It was meant for the professor to get a sense of how we
write, our strengths, and what we need to work on this semester.
The second essay, research/evaluation, required us to synthesize evidence
from scholarly sources, utilize textual evidence in order to argue a position, present
an evaluative claim critically and interrogatively, examine multiple perspective, and
articulate a coherent thesis that will frame our essay.
For the writers identity essay, the situation was writing a narrative, reflective
essay that explores my identity. I reflected back on two writing experiences I had in
the past- both positive and negative. I wanted the focus of the paper to be me
reflecting on my experiences. I refrained from giving too much dialogue.
The situation at hand for the research/evaluation essay was to analyze a
position on a controversial issue identifying the criteria of evaluation and exploring
the various perspectives and contexts. My topic was about the consideration of
differences concerning the role of gender in shaping our lives; the intense decline of
the American male. I am certain that many people are convinced that men are not
on the decline, while I disagree and take the stand that they are indeed on the
decline. I favored towards men are on the decline because of the extensive
evidence given in the article and book chapters of End of Men and The Decline of
Men. I concentrated more on the evaluation portion rather than the research. My
reasoning behind this was to overpower the audience with my opinion as opposed

to boring them with a whole heap of statistics that would cause them to lose
interest while reading. Since the genre of this essay is research, I deemed it
necessary to have a formal tone. I compared it to the real world. When there is a
presidential debate, both parties are speaking in a formal yet very understandable
tone. I was trying to mimic this style. Such measures make the writer more
creditable and they make good public relations.
From writing the research/evaluation paper, I am now more familiar with how
to structure my counter-argument/rebuttal part of the essay. Beforehand, I was
more knowledgeable on how to write a typical argumentative paper. A counterargument paragraph makes for a stronger research paper. I found difficulty on how I
should structure a counter-argument in my essay. However, with help from my
professor, I got a better understanding of how it should be done. The Everythings
An Argument book made writing the paper a lot less stressful. The examples gave
me a firm foundation on how I should structure my own evidence and claims
throughout my paper. The peer critiques also added to this paper. They gave me
ideas to further develop my paper. I also had a few sentences that needed revision
because they were not clear and concise. For this writing project, the final paper
was wrote up considering the peer and instructor feedback.
Reflecting back on writing the research/evaluation essay, I would have taken
more time to develop the counter-argument. I felt my paper had a nice flow, but
was missing a strong counter-argument to tie everything back to the position with
which I disagreed. In the future, I think it would be beneficial for me to do as much
research on my counter-argument as I would for my main argument, since they are
both critical for a great research paper . This allows me to evaluate my topic on

both ends thoroughly and provide reasons and evidence to write a strong research
paper.

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