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Vincent Cade
Professor Collins
ENGL 1302
12 May 2016
The Bittersweet End to English 1302
Before taking English 1302, I had a very minuscule understanding about communicating
through academic writing. Although I have already taken English 1301, the prerequisite to this
class, in the end I was still confused on how to improve my writing skills and make my writing
more academic than it was before. In my opinion, English 1301 was more of an introduction to
academic writing and it did not teach me as much as I wished it had. However, the same can not
be said about English 1302. I believe that some of the skills I have built upon and become better
at are constructing my essays, appointing more descriptive words, and reducing the grammatical
errors that are throughout my papers. I conclude that not only peer reviewing, but professor
Collins presentations and handouts are the reasoning behind my improved academic writing.
Peer reviewing has always been a step that I have taken in the process of writing an essay,
no matter the size or content of the essay. Although I already knew how to peer review and what
it was before English 1302, this class still taught me how to review other students essays better
and helped me grasp the whole concept of how important it is to peer review. However most
importantly, peer reviewing has helped improve every single one of my essays in ways I could
not have done by myself. A great deal of the items fixed in my papers are grammatical errors or
the changing of a sentence in order to have a clearer message. An example of this would be in
essay 3, where I originally wrote Huge fast food industries that are known country and worldwide such as McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Burger King are the reasons behind the
increase in obese people we see today, but was then changed due to what was pointed out
through the peer review process. The reviewer told me that I Introduce 3 fast food chains, but
only talked about one. This comment made me realize that I needed to change the sentence and

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make it more understandable, that I was focusing on one specific fast food restaurant. Peer
reviewing helped make my essays superior in multiple ways, but having in class presentations
was a more tremendous help than anything else.
When it comes to learning, I am personally a visual learner. The PowerPoint
presentations and handouts professor Collins used in class were extremely helpful and I believe
without them I would not have done as well as I did in the class. I assume this is true because in
English 1301, the class did not have presentations and handouts at our disposal, at least not as
well assembled and descriptive ones; I believe I received a low grade in this course due to this.
There are many examples of presentations that helped me with my essays, but the most important
one was the week four presentation that had the MEAL plan. An example of this would be in
my rhetorical analysis, Tear Down The Wall Between Communism and Freedom, in paragraph
three. I start the paragraph with my main idea that Ronald Reagan is a credible person with ethos
in his speech. I then give my evidence and analysis of how this is true, and then I tied it all
together by linking the paragraph back to the thesis. In my opinion, the key to having a great
essay is to have wonderful paragraph structure, and I learned that from professor Collins
presentations.
I am confident that I now know more about communicating through academic writing
than I ever have before, and I believe this is because of English 1302. I have learned multiple
things in this class that have improved my writing immensely. Everything from simple
presentation slides that give an outline of what content should be in the essay to in-depth peer
reviewing from students are what have helped me improve and grow in writing. I am pleased to
have had the chance to take this class and believe it has prepared me greatly for college.