Baez 1

Alyssa Baez
Professor Collins
ENGL 1302
16 August 2015
Traveling Back To The Past
Academic writing requires a significant amount of thought and effort. Looking back on
this semester, I am grateful for the guidance of Professor Collins and her contribution in helping
me understand the English language. My writing and grades reflect that I have improved over the
course of this summer semester. Overall, my successful in writing is contributed to peer reviews,
learning how to organize my thoughts and using the ratiocination technique.
The peer review that I was required to participate in significantly improved my grade on
each essay. By receiving peer reviews from several individuals it allowed me to correct simple
mistakes such as coordinating conjunctions, comma placement or misplacement, and
grammatical errors. In essay two, one of the peer reviewers pointed out that an article title was
improperly cited. PROCURING PROTECTION: USING THE FALSE CLAIMS ACT TO
COMBAT HUMAN TRAFFICKING BY GOVERNMENT CONTRACTORS, (Humans in)
needed to be in lower case letters and the font did not need to be italicized. The use of italicized
names occurred twice in this paper and thanks to a peer review points were not deducted from
the final draft. Another mistake that was made in essay two was the forgotten citation and
incorrectly naming the proper source. The title, The Houston Chronicle needed to be placed in
front of the quote (Humans in). Another great example of a peer review was on page two
where it was recommended that I introduce quote with a signal verb (Kelly). The development
and improvement of my writing was contributed to the feedback given by peer reviewers.

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In order to receive an excellent grade on essays it was required to learn organizational
skills to improve said paper. On essay three the usage of the MEAL plan was utilized and
allowed for my paper to be better understood. The proper usage of the MEAL plan included the
thesis statement and topic sentences. For the paper to be well developed the topic sentences
needed to link back to the thesis statement. The nonprofit organization will follow state and
federal guidelines in order to work with the federal government to help victims of human
trafficking, (Legalities Make). By tying the main idea to the thesis there is insight and the
explanation is far deep than just the surface meaning of the words. It provides a deeper meaning
and shows how it contributes to the essay overall. The other part of the meal plan includes the
usage of evidence followed by analysis. However, the balance between analysis and evidence
must be even. By following the structure of the MEAL plan it became easier to write a paper and
improved the quality of my work significantly. Utilizing the MEAL to organize my papers taught
me how to present my thoughts in an orderly fashion and improved the grades I received.
The ratiocination technique played a major role in the development of the papers and
decrease grammatical errors, this also contributed to the improvement of my works. The paper
required diversity in sentence structure to prevent readers from becoming bored or uninterested
by the work. Using the ratiocination method, I became aware that my paper lacked variety in the
sentence structure. In the first essay I was able to modify my paper to improve it. He does this
to elicit a sense of responsibility from the public that would cause the citizens to heed his advice
and educe chance from people, (Abe in) was changed to vary sentence structure. It became a
short sentence that was one line long and a medium sentence with two lines. The use of be
verbs were reduced, the first word of every sentence was highlighted so that it could also vary.
The amount of are and was words decreased in word count to improve the paper. The

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purpose of ratiocination was to enhance my paper and increase the quality as well as grade of the
essay.
The ratiocination technique, peer reviews, and learning how to organize essays
contributed to a better understand of the English language as well as developed my writing skills.
Following the procedure of the MEAL plan on each essay helped organize my thoughts and
allowed my work to be more easily understood instead of being scattered. The peer reviews gave
me positive feedback and gave me the opportunity to fix mistakes that I did not see in my papers.
The ratiocination technique prevented me from using words over and over at the beginning of
sentences. It also required me to reduce the amount of be words and have signal verbs present.
Without following the processes instructed by Professor Collins, my understanding of academic
writing would not have improved as much as it did.