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Sydney Dominique

English 101
Ms. Lilley
April 17, 2019

Self-Reflection

My first year of college has been an eye-opening experience, coming into my last few

weeks of my freshman year I’m reflecting on myself as a person and looking into this that I’ve

challenged with and am still challenging with and things that I have grown to work on and leave

behind, I’ve learned a lot about myself and who I am as a person. Coming from high school

where I had minimal things to do and the things, I had to do were very minimal and simplistic,

coming to college was a big adjustment which I’m still learning and adjusting to the life of a

college student and learning how to balance my school work and social life. I’ve slowly but

surely have learned a lot about managing my time and making sure not to procrastinate last

minute.

Learning how to balance my social life and my school life and personal life have been

the biggest task I’ve been trying to accomplish and figure out how to handle. Some of the ways

I’ve learned to stop procrastinating has been to lessen my time hanging out with friends during

the school week, I tend to push things back when I’m hanging with my friends and then I end up

forgetting to do it. The second thing I’ve worked on is going on UNCG canvas to see my

assignments and finish them ahead of time, so I have more time later to relax. I’ve learned when

it comes to college it’s all about placing things that are top priority first and planning around

different assignments.
When it comes to the classes that I’ve started taking some of my strengths that have

helped me grow as a person and a student, has been my determination as a student any

assignment or obstacle that I got thrown my way I don’t give up until I’ve accomplished said

task. This helps with making sure I finish whatever I start even if it’s in a subject that I don’t feel

passionately about. While in this class I’ve learned a lot about my strength and weaknesses

especially when it comes to typing a paper. One thing I’ve learned is that I tend to not have much

organization when It comes to writing a paper, so without the structure of the paper I tend to go Commented [j1]: This sentence really needs to be fixed

off and rant about another topic that has nothing to do with the topic.

Learning to follow a structure when typing a paper will help with the final paper and the

rough draft, it’ll help with figure out what all I should incorporate into my paper. The last thing

that I’ve noticed in my writing that I should work on is that I tend to fluff during my papers and

that causes me to talk about things that have nothing to do with my paper, I think this and

waiting until last minute tot plan out what I’m going to do with my paper causes me to fluff so Commented [j2]: I think you meant until

that I meet the criteria of the paper.

The paper I chose to revise was one of the worst papers I did this semester which was the

Visual rhetorical analysis paper, in this paper I did a rhetorical analysis of the Cosmopolitan ad

which was Aussie moist. In this paper I had to discuss which rhetorical devices the creator used

and why I felt they made the ad effective. I feel I personally didn’t choose a good ad because It

didn’t give me enough to work with, the ad personally didn’t have many words or colors. The

model took up 90% of the ad so in regard to the ethos, pathos and logos I didn’t have enough

information to effectively work with the ad.

For the revision of the ad I worked on adding information to the paper to make it flow

better and expand on the rhetorical devices I used in the paper. The feedback I received on this Commented [j3]: Should be one word
paper helped me tremendously when it came to the revision of this paper, some of the feedback

that gave me a better understanding of what the paper was looking for was me using “I believe”

statements in a paper that’s more of an analysis instead of an opinion.

The other things that I revised in this paper and things I should work on is following

directions more effectively and making sure to read through the steps and the requirements of a

paper a little longer. This feedback showed me things I need to work on when it comes to typing

a paper and doing anything in life. Most things in life require 1 basic rule just to follow the

directions and not add anything extra. Working on this is something I’m learning to fix and

adjust, I just tend to add extra things which are totally off guard or could be said in another way.

One thing that I’ve also learned this semester in all of my classes is that I love to be

creative and I like to add my own style and flavor to anything I do, so that’s why this Portfolio is

going to give me an opportunity to be myself and creative something that represents me and who

I am. For the website I’m going to go with something metropolitan for the theme of the website,

I love the city and the city life so going with something that I hope to one day be able to

experience and live in is important to me. The purpose of this website is to show off things I’ve

done during this semester that I put a lot of effort into and show the different things I’ve learned

this semester, during this semester of classes and to show what I’m improving on and things I

will continue to work on as a student.

The creative element which will be the final part of this portfolio that I put time and

effort into will be showing how I take a paper and turn it into something creative and something

that shows the versatility of my work. The paper I chose to revise was the Visual rhetorical

analysis paper so for this paper I chose to make my own ad and take what I saw in the Aussie ad

and ad to it.The creative element I chose to do for my Visual rhetorical paper was to take the
advertisement I used originally and add things that I think will make the advertisement flow

smoother and add to the things I wish the ad had before I talked about it. The purpose of this is to

show what I think could have been done to make this advertisement more effective to its

audience. I will be keeping the whole point of the ad I’ll just add things to give it more spice,

things that I feel with draw the buyer in and make them want to purchase this product and put

their friends on it also.

Throughout this class I’ve learned how to take a paper and figure out the rhetorical

devices the writer is using and how these have made for a successful paper, or advertisement or

whatever I’m looking at. I’ve also learned to summarize a passage or anything that I’m writing

and only incorporate the important elements of the paper. I’ve always had a problem when it

came to make sure I didn’t talk to much or fluff, I’ve slowly tried to get out of that High school

mentality. The last thing I feel I learned was reviewing other students work and the things to look

for in said paper or assignment. I believe being able to Peer review another students work is key

to working in group projects which I know I’ll be doing a lot of here in college, giving another

student constructive criticism of their work so they know what to fix and how to not make this

error again is key to a successful career.

In conclusion I feel this experience my first year has came with plenty of ups and downs

and things that I can work on and learn from, but ultimately, I wouldn’t trade it for the world, it’s

opened my eyes to things I used to be okay with doing and changed my ways. It’s gave me a way

to get out of my comfort zone and participate in things I would’ve never participated in and

made me more aware of life around me. Realizing that I’m growing up and maturing into a

young woman whose has to be more independent and learning to take criticism and instead of
having an attitude about what is being said, take it into consideration and learn and grown from

it.

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