Blog 4: Reflection

In the short time that I have been in this english class I have learned a few things and have caught on to a few things that I thought I knew before. One of the subject matters that have been made clear to me was what a thesis is. I thought a thesis was just a main point to an essay your writing, when in actuality it’s much more. A thesis is where you stand on any particular subject, but can’t be just your opinion. An example we used in class was you can say “I’m against animal testing” that’s just your opinion. An example of a thesis would be “I’m against animal testing because it’s unethical and harmful”. Another subject matter that I was confused on was topic sentences. To me I thought it was basically the same thing as a thesis. As you can clearly see English is not one of my stronger subjects. The topic sentence or sentences are simply used to enforce or support your thesis statement. The prewriting exercise were a plus, I used to do that in high school. I believe my teacher called it free writing. I use it a lot in order to get my ideas flowing about the essay or writing assignment. Since I’m not very good at writing correctly I would have to say that writing a good essay in its correct format is definitely my biggest challenge. I guess it’s just going to have to be something that I practice and work hard at in order to improve.

The interaction with the other English class was cool. I was a bit nervous at first to leave a comment to a total stranger but I was respectful and gave my honest opinion on their work which I hope was useful. It’s a little bit easier responding or commenting on your classmates work because after a while you build a relationship with them and get more comfortable in giving your opinion to them. I don’t believe that critiquing someone else’s work made me more confident in my ability to write a correct summary when I wasn’t sure what a good summary consisted of until we talked about it in class that day.

finally i close out this blog with saying that I hope I pass these classes.