3rd Trimester

In this reflection, I will be talking about what new information I learned and what skills I achieved through the process of writing an academic essay. As it was the last day of English class as a middle school student, I’d like to thoroughly reflect on this trimester. First of all, I learned the basic rules of an academic essay, and how these differ from our usual writings. For example, personal pronouns as well as sweeping generalizations such as “never”, shouldn’t be included. Especially the word “I”, unless you are talking about your personal experience, must be avoided since you are trying to make a claim. In addition, avoiding terms like “always” can make it harder for others to argue against your point, thereby resulting in a stronger essay. Not only word choices, but the formatting, structure, and flow of your academic essay can also largely influence your entire piece. I think one of the most important things I learned is that your strongest points should always come first and last, whether it be the body paragraphs itself or the evidence within each of them. I think that throughout my writing, I was able to use this knowledge to improve my essay. In my first body pagraph, I made the claim that phones at the dinner table can cause harm to human interactions, and in my last body paragraph, argued that mobile use can be seen as unmannerly. I chose to order it this way since it’s these two points are the ones that have more, and stronger pieces of evidence. However, as for balance of the number of sentences in my paragraphs, I felt that it could’ve been better. We learnt that we should aim for around 8-11 sentences per paragraph, and while my body paragraphs are all about 13 sentences, my introduction and conclusion was around 8. For this reason, I felt that I need to keep in mind how many sentences to aim for, when writing academic essays. In addition, I think I did a good job of structuring my essay in a way that persuades the opponents. I chose the format in which I state the other side’s view at the beginning of each paragraph, and follow it with 2 of my arguments. Looking back, I feel that I made the right decision since it allowed me to closely inspect the three aspects I talked about. Besides writing skills, I also learnt new ways to proof-read my essay, and how to easily create a bibliography through the use of online tools. I’m sure that these tools including “Lextutor” and “Zorero”, will come in handy in the near and far future. This is because through this whole trimester, Lextutor helped me widen the range of vocabulary used in my writing, and using Zotero helped me reduce the time spent on my bibliography. In addition, since this project involved some teamwork, I was able to boost skills that I haven’t been able to much. For one, my in order to find the flaws in our essays, we had to work together as a team. And personally, I think that having to do so this trimester helped me get better at communicating. Towards the beginning, our group members didn’t comment on each other’s e-portfolios as much as we did later on. Plus, editing each other's writing helped me understand what to keep in mind when reading through. By achieving this skill, I can now be more keen when reading my own writings in the future. Lastly, I think that I was able to grow as a researcher as well. To find pieces of information to include in my essay to support my arguments, lots of research had to be done. Through this process, I became better at finding trustworthy, reliable sources. For example, Mr. Paterson taught us that search engines such as a Google Scholar are extremely helpful. This semester, I was able to put this knowledge to good use, and find strong evidence. From reflecting on the work we did this trimester, I came to the conclusion that I gained lots of new knowledge and abilities. Although there are some points that could’ve been improved, I’d like to take this as an opportunity to further enhance my skills as a writer, student, and researcher.