Sample 4
English 130X
Fall 2016
My name is Sample 4. I am currently a Freshman majoring in Bilingual Education. I would like to work in low income communities to give children an opportunity to do well in school. As a writer, I tend to be hard on myself. I get stressed out as I write and run out of ideas or what to write about. I often confuse myself when writing, especially in my body paragraphs because I forget what I’m writing about and switch to another subject. I struggle with this a lot and I constantly erase my sentences because they aren’t good enough. Something I don’t do is proof read my essays because I get lazy, and maybe if I did go over my essay, I could catch the mistakes I made.
I chose my first essay, where we analyze a poster for the SB 1070 law in Arizona, because I found myself talking about things that were confusing to the audience in terms of what I was talking about in my introduction. My stance was that some criteria were effective and others weren’t, but overall the poster was effective in making a change and advocating for immigration reform. My professor gave me feedback and said “rework the introduction so that you make a clear distinction between SB 1070 and the book”. I went back to rephrase things where I changed the beginning of the sentence and explained what I was talking about, whether it was The Hunting Season or the Arizona’s SB 1070 poster. This was for the introduction and I’m glad she pointed it out because when I read it, I was confused. For my logos, I contradicted myself because I said the evidence I used was logos, but not factual evidence; They are the same thing so it doesn’t make any sense. I changed it to say that the contact information provided was logical evidence, but it wasn’t effective in motivating the audience to contact them because action had to be taken and then poster can’t physically do that. I said “some people don’t take their time to use that information”, therefore it isn’t effective. For me, my strongest paragraph was the pathos paragraph because there was a lot of evidence I could use and relate to the issue. There were so many symbols and signs that had a lot of meaning that I interpreted to being effective. I said “the poster contains phrases that catches a Hispanics attention because it’s meant for them to fight back in response to the law” and this explains what my paragraph is about. I am able to stay on topic while avoiding being repetitive, which is something I do. For this paragraph m thoughts aren’t all over the place and that’s another good thing about the paragraph.
In my third essay, my proposal essay, I talked about the effects of minimum wage on illegal immigrants and how unfair the pay is for them. I proposed that a new law should be placed in order to prevent jobs from paying people less than the minimum wage. I fixed my evidence because I was talking about another group of people that weren’t my main focus. My professor said “refocus to adult immigrants in this example or migrant workers” because I was talking about migrant field workers instead of illegal immigrants. I was able to manipulate my evidence so that it could still back up my thesis without having to include other evidence. I said migrant workers “don’t get enough pay for the conditions they’re working under” where they are suffering along with immigrants, demonstrating that they are both victims from unequal pay and that they would benefit from the new law created. In my thesis, I generalized about who I was talking about, and although the main focus was on illegal immigrants, I related the issue to both groups which really helped me out. This was mainly what I needed to work on besides my spelling. My strongest paragraph for this essay was my introduction. Though it’s long, it includes a lot of necessary information, like background information, to make my essay stronger. If I didn’t include those details, then the reader would be confused and would have to fill in the blanks. I wanted to start off with a fact about those who make less earnings and it would catch the reader’s attention. From that, I was able to build on and make my argument better and more reliable.
Over the course of the semester, I feel more confident in my writing because my grades have reflected how I write or how I am as a writer. My strengths for my writing consist of being able to plan out an outline and being able to gather up my evidence. Once I figure out how I want my essay to look like I write it down and it helps me visualize and think about what I can include in my essay. The outline makes things a lot easier and my professor, Dr. XXXX, influenced me to do them and I thank her for it because now I will start doing it every time. As for the things I need to work on, I don’t use a lot of diction which could strengthen my essay, but I continue to be repetitive throughout it. I sometimes I’m in a rush and I misspell things or I use a word incorrectly, and if I proof read it I would be able to prevent that; it would also give me a higher grade and it shows that I wasn’t checking over my work. I fixed those and it made me realize how it makes my writing look less appealing because they are simply mistakes. These are things I have noticed and that my peers have mentioned to me as well as my professor. They are things that I will take in consideration as I move into English 1302 because then I will be successful.
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English 130X Sample 4
Autumn of 2016
Sample 4 is my name. I am a first-year student majoring in Bilingual Education. I’d like to work in low-income communities to give children a chance to succeed in school. As a writer, I am notoriously critical of myself. I get stressed out while writing because I run out of ideas or topics to write about. When I’m writing, I frequently get myself mixed up, especially in the body paragraphs, because I lose track of what I’m writing about and switch to another topic. I have a lot of trouble with this, and I constantly delete my sentences because they aren’t good enough. Something I don’t do is proof read my essays because I get lazy, and maybe if I did go
