Micaela Sprinkle

Professor Maple
Nov 30, 2018
English 101
Critical Reflection

Writing papers has always been a struggle for me and was never my strong suit. Before this

semester I was only good at the simple things like grammar, punctuation, and ideas to come up

with to write about when it came to write a paper. But as far as creating a thesis statement,

making a good introduction, or even having good details within my story I was never good at

that. This class has helped me improve my writing skills a little bit, but I just do not think I will

ever be a good writer. I am now able to make my papers flow better, come up with a decent

introduction and conclusion but I am still working on how to add more details in my papers.

Now that the class is over I can now reflect on how I improved myself, what specifically I

improved on and how I made all my papers better.

Although writing all my papers was hard even down to the critical reflections I would have to

say the hardest one I wrote was my personal narrative paper. That paper was about college life

versus high school. The hardest part for writing that paper was trying to get in specific details so

you could picture everything in your head instead of just reading some boring paper. Also, I

wanted to create an interesting hook to pull my readers in from the beginning. Without a good

hook the reader would not take a second glance at my paper or the whole time they would be

bored with it. So, I started my paper off with “Good morning, evening or night to whomever is

reading this” hoping that it would catch the reader’s attention because it is different. When I was

writing this paper, I wanted to make sure each paragraph flowed to the next one smoothly, so I

used smooth transition words like “next, also, then, etc.” and that made the paper flow better.

One part that I feel that I wrote well was the third paragraph. It was about how different it was
 Micaela Sprinkle
Professor Maple
Nov 30, 2018
English 101
Critical Reflection
living on campus versus being at home. There was so much to say that was different, so I was

able to make that paragraph sound interesting and talk about different things like how everything

is walking distance or how I have to share a community bathroom with like 15 other girls who I

cannot control what they do in there. That paragraph is probably the one with the most details.

For the introduction I tried to think of more ideas to add to make it longer but I could not really

think of anything else to say because it was already to the point.

Now my rhetorical analysis paper was not as hard as writing the personal narrative one. For this

paper I basically just had to choose two advertisements of the same form, find logos, pathos, and

ethos in both and which one I believe was more effective. For this paper I decided to find a way

to challenge myself a little bit since I had grown confident and choose two speeches that I would

have to analyze. The two speeches I chose was the Gettysburg Address and What to the Slave is

the Fourth of July. I felt that these two would challenge me well because it was around the same

time in history and since they were speeches made a long time ago their words would be put

differently so it was nice to try to understand what they meant when they said certain things. I

was able to make the introduction well by talking about the two speeches, giving my readers

some background on the speeches and how ethos, pathos, and logos played a huge role in the

speakers convincing their audience to side with them. The easiest part about writing this paper

was stating the pathos which is emotion and how they used this to get to their audience. Like for

the Gettysburg Address Lincoln used pathos against his audience by making them feel sad about

the many deaths of soldiers that fought in the Civil War. By doing this it and them want to go out

and fight in respect for them so now Lincoln had people wanting to join the military. For What to
 Micaela Sprinkle
Professor Maple
Nov 30, 2018
English 101
Critical Reflection
the Slave is the Fourth of July Douglas used pathos by making African Americans look back at

the way whites treat them and it mad them angry. So, pathos was the easiest part, now one part

that was a little more difficult to write was the part for logos. There wasn’t really any logic or

facts that I could find to support the speeches. The one that had at least one was the Gettysburg

Address when he talks about when the United States was found and the Declaration of

Independence but that was all. Overall I was proud how this paper had turned out and I could see

my progress in the introduction.

Now that I have actually reflected on my work I am tremendously impressed with the progress I

made from my first paper in this class to the second. I started to learn how to plan better like

making outlines and bubble maps for the ideas I have. Even though I know there are still some

things I need to work on like details and conclusions if I keep practicing and asking for advice I

think I will do well in writing papers.