The Semester
I started this class during the second semester of my first year of college, and I was nervous about this class as I was never good at writing essays. Throughout the course, we had two major essays, one of which was an argument essay and a rhetorical analysis essay. For all my essays, I decided to write about the epidemic of suicide. During my 16-week course, I improved my skill in grammar, citations, and organization.
The essay that taught me the most was the argument essay. In this essay, I discussed the different ways to decrease the rates of suicide. At the start of this essay, I struggled and doubted multiple times that I wouldn’t be able to complete the essay. But after a few hours studying how to write an argumentative essay, it made a lot more sense. I did many hours of research, looked through many studies, journals, and news articles, and used that research as evidence to claim what I was saying was reliable. With this essay, I learned how to brainstorm with what things I already knew about my topic, how to research, and the importance of knowing how and why to cite your work. When I first submitted my argument essay, I had many errors with my essay Professor Hammett brought to my attention that many times throughout my essay, I was flowing away from the format and topic of which I was writing and that my citations did not match the ones I had on my paragraphs. After going back and reworking the errors in my essays, I resubmitted my essay and achieved a grade of 92 which shocked me with excitement because I never saw myself scoring that high on an essay.
Overall, I have acquired a lot of new knowledge through this course. I learned the importance of citations and the proper ways to work on essays. I also identified my mistakes and attempted to fix the errors to achieve the goal of getting a better grade. I have developed through this course the skills I need to know how to write and do a fantastic job in essays in the future.