Reflection Essay

Ta’Nya Jones 

English Composition II

Professor Hammett

Reflection Essay 

30 November, 2023 

Word Count: 350

The Growth in My Writing 

At the beginning of this year, I thought I knew how to write an essay and cite my work correctly, but as the year went on I realized that I still had plenty to learn and work on. The first essay I did in English Comp II was an Argument Proposal essay about Rape on College Campuses. Before writing the essay I never fully paid attention to the assignments and lessons given to me to help and give me more skills to use in the essay. I assumed since I knew what website to use to cite my work and that I had a wide vocabulary I would easily receive an A on the assignment, but when Professor Hammett first returned the essay to me and my grade said 50/100 I was lost for words. What I struggled with the most was my reference page, which is ironic because I honestly thought that’s what I did best on. When it came to essays and using sources, such as websites or books, I thought that if I pulled information from a source and re-worded it I would just have to put the citation on the references page, I didn’t know in-text citations existed. For example, in the essay, before I completed any revisions, I stated that “in the 21st century, sexual assault incidents on campuses are at an all-time high; females, African Americans, and people in the LGBTQ community are the high-risk targets”, I came up with that statement by reading multiple different articles and putting the information into my own words. I soon learned that any statement I made had to be proved and the proof needed an in-text citation with it. That also ties in with the Point, Evidence, and Explanation (PEE) format that I’ve learned while being in this class. The PEE format gave me a simpler way to construct my essays and give them length. Once I got my references page and in-text citations together I received a final grade of  97/100 on my assignment which was the best college essay I’ve written so far.