Reflective Essay

Phoebe Cuthbertson

WRIT 1733

June 11, 2018

Reflective Essay

1. Looking back
1. Looking back, the third quarter of this year was a difficult time for me and I had a lot of trouble in all of my classes. With this particular class, I had trouble at the beginning with deciding what story I wanted to do for my longform essay. I had several ideas that all fell apart due to them not being real “stories”. When I finally found what I wanted to write my essay on, we were already well into the quarter. This topic proved to be an interesting story and I was able to write quite a bit about it, but I sometimes did get stuck and didn’t know if there was anything else I could write about. I also had some issues with the formatting of my essay. I was often moving paragraphs around to give my longform a better flow and better structure. With my research, there were a lot of things I couldn’t find on the school library page, so I did have to use quite a few outside resources to be able to write everything I wanted. I found the stage 3 draft particularly difficult because it was quite difficult to find a concrete subject to discuss.
2. Looking inward
1. I felt at times like doing this particular subject was somewhat risky - one of the biggest risks I took was starting too late and being behind the entire quarter, and another huge risk I took was putting it off for too long and having to write a large amount of text within only a few days. I could have instead spread it out over the course of several days, which is more efficient and easier. The particular story I wrote the essay on is notable for being risky due to the overall theme being a controversial issue today. With police brutality being one of the main themes of my story, I felt like it was important to form my own opinion on the matter. Another one of the main themes of the story was torture, and I found it somewhat difficult to discuss torture in relation to the story.
3. Looking outward
1. Because my project was somewhat rushed and doesn’t exactly meet the page expectation, I think some people may see it as somewhat sloppy. Another reason people may find it sloppy is because of the format of the essay and the paragraphs not being cohesive enough. However, I do tend to underestimate my writing skills, and multiple people have said that my writing has greatly improved over the past few years. My story has actually been in the news recently, which makes it more relevant than it would have been had I written it a few years ago. I think the story will also be relevant for some of my intended audience who live near me - since I live in the Chicago area and so do most of my friends, some of them may see it as quite shocking, or expected due to the city’s reputation of being crime-ridden. Some of my expected audience may already know about it, and some may be shocked by it.
4. Looking forward
1. This project will definitely help me with time management in the future and staying on top of things. My main problem this quarter was that I was not on top of things like most people in the class were, so I fell behind and had to reap the consequences. Although this quarter was difficult for me, I think it was a learning experience and I will do better in the future with knowledge of the mistakes I made during the past couple of months.