Amanda Couture ENGL 2100 Ms.

Camargo 05/06/2013 Reflective Essay At the beginning of the semester I feel like I had the usual freshman attitude about English, wait till last minute to write a paper and if you get a B, great job. This is where I have truly changed as a writer; procrastination is no more, or at least not as much as I used to. While some say procrastination helps you write quickly and get your ideas going, its truly not as helpful as taking your time when writing a paper. Procrastination doesnt allow for revisions and analyzing your work, it only allows you to spit out something quickly and not to look back. On assignment three, I took the annotations research very seriously. I looked through my books to find the best chapters to use to annotate A Midsummer Nights Dream and from there I took extensive two and a half page notes on each chapter. This hard work and effort paid off in the end because I scored a perfect grade. This positively reinforced my efforts to continue writing early and sticking to my new writing process. Not only did I become a writer, I learned so much that will help me in my future classes, mainly about critical analyses. Critical analyses gave me a whole new understanding of not only how to read certain papers but write them. Before this class, I had no idea what a Marxist critical analysis was and how I could possibly use it to read a text. Learning this has made me a wellrounded writer. This year I feel like I have improved a little bit of everything from my writing. However, these changes did not come easy and there were many times were I became very stressed and cried until I came up with a good idea. The second essay really challenged my

abilities as a writer. While many think that analyzing a short story is a lot easier to use to write a paper, they are wrong. There was so much more textual evidence that it became hard to pick out and write about. I would forget the pages and lines I would find quotes on to use for my paper. To challenge myself, I scanned each page of the short story in the cinderblock sized anthology, highlighted and annotated to make writing this paper a bit easier on myself. While I put a lot more effort into the paper than planned, it was worth it. Being less stressed at the end of the day is always better than taking the easy route to writing a paper. This semester my writing process changed and will definitely continue to change but it was definitely not something I was expecting. A huge part to the writing process, as any writer will tell you, is being comfortable. At first, I thought being comfortable was lying in bed watching Netflix while writing my paper, wrong. While watching my boyfriend play basketball, I brought my English homework to try and get something done. I got everything done while watching him. I realized all I needed to comfortably write was background noise. I needed something I wasnt going to pay attention to but still going on in the background. Another thing that is changed has been note taking. I take my English notebook to class every single day of the week, so if I have time, Ill take notes and outline my paper when I have the time. One thing that I really need to improve is writing forward. I focus too much on the little details in the paper than the main idea of my work. My backspace key and eraser are too important. I need to learn how to spit things out of my head onto paper and then focus on organization, grammar, and sentence structure. There are definitely many strengths and weaknesses in all of the papers I have written this semester. In the first essay, I really had the difficultly of digging deeper into my poem to find textual evidence for my paper. In the final comment on my paper Ms. Camargo says, I

want you to keep digging for more theres a lot more there. I feel like I have a hard time connecting ideas in my paper and it takes a few revisions until I can finally get there. However, in this paper, I feel like I brought in strong textual evidence that would prove the point I am trying to get across. For instance, in the poem the speaker in a song in the front yard says, And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace/And strut down the streets with paint on my face, (lines 19-20). I then connected these lines as the young girls war paint and armor. This paint is what she wears for the battle against the suppression of women; this gives her the strength she needs to conquer the world. The second essay, a feminist analysis on Killings by Andre Dubus, proved to be very challenging for me. I had a hard time clarifying what I was arguing for. When looking at a feminist studies and gender analysis critical analysis, a lot calls for looking into who the author is and how their life affected the characters roles within the story. I definitely had a difficult time trying to show what I was arguing for. Was it how the author affected the characters? Or was it how the characters were treated in the short story and what did that have to do with stereotypical roles? On a positive note, in my paper I do a very good job of defining all of the conflict between roles and how they affect the fathers decision to kill his sons murderer. The father has pressure from society, his wife, and the ever present murderer in his town. This is where I stand out in my paper. The most challenging aspect of the third assignment was finding sources for my annotated bibliography before my classmates did. Finding perfect sources, especially for Shakespeares plays, was very difficult especially when twenty other students were after the same books you were. In order to overcome this challenge, I requested early and made sure I was the only one. My strength in my annotated bibliography would be connecting the analysis to the

annotation. My book was on the domination and defiance of the fathers and daughters of Shakespeare so looking at it from a feminist perspective was very helpful. This is the assignment I was truly confident about because I spent the most time writing and revising it to make sure it was perfect when I submitted it. Using the Green World perspective on A Midsummer Nights Dream was a little challenging because I had to truly dig deep within the poem to find textual evidence to show the growth and positive change within the characters. While this seemed to be a great challenge, I feel like I explained and showed how the characters changed within the forest. English 2100 will definitely stick with me in my future English classes. I truly had fun learning and reading about Shakespeare and having class discussions on everything. I learned a new ways of analyzing works of literature, how literature is more than just books but any work of art, and most of all to put the best effort I can into every paper I write. I want to make sure I continue working hard to prevent my procrastination ways from resurfacing any way I can.