Nick Porcelli

Professor Madruga

ENC 1102

4/20/22

Nick Porcelli’s Reflective Essay

When I first walked into. My ENC 1102 class, I felt confident. I believed that this class

was going to be exactly like ENC 1101, a class that I had done well in, and therefore thought that

the class was going to be easy. That was not true. First, I quickly learned that the class wasn’t

anything like ENC 1101. The main reason was that overall, the entire class was based around one

thing, a scholarly article that I would be turning in near the end of the semester. Literally

everything we were going to do in this class served to help me create the scholarly article. The

statement I said earlier that I believed this class was going to be easy wasn’t true because of this

aspect of the class. Writing the scholarly article was difficult for me. There were so many things

I struggled to understand or learn. There were many days where I struggled. I know in writing

that it sounds like this class was the absolute worse for me, but I want to make it clear that that

wasn’t the case. I am a pending journalism major, and to be in that major I need to know how to

write. The struggles I faced in this class helped teach me how to write better. The class

introduced me to new types of writing and made me analyze my relationship as a writer.

I now want to analyze my time in the class and my time spent creating the scholarly

article by addressing some of statements I made in the first paragraph. The first statement I want

to talk about is my statement that I struggled a lot in the class because I had a hard time

understanding lessons and concepts. The main concept I struggled with was the idea of writer’s

context. I remember that the first few weeks of class, the time which was spent helping create the
annotated bibliography and literature review was difficult for me. The reason for this was I

couldn’t tart to find any secondary sources because I didn’t have a topic to write about. I

struggled to grasp the idea of creating a writing topic where I could talk about something in a

writing context. I remember that for the first few weeks I tried to create a writing question based

around a sports topic. I wanted to make it sports related because I wanted to write about

something I was a fan of. But no matter what I did, I couldn’t create a question that worked.

Every time I thought I had a good idea and presented it to Professor Madruga, I would be told

that at best it could barely work, and even then, it would be a lot of work. I eventually had to take

a night and read through all the notes I had been given on web course to eventually understand

how to make a question that would allow me to analyze something in a writer’s context. I learned

that I just couldn’t make a sports topic work, so I moved on and decided to write about a

different topic. Once I chose a different topic, things became easier. I was able to create the

literature review, which would then make the rest of the scholarly article process easy. By

creating the literature review, I was able to see common patterns of anti-vaccine groups on social

media. This helped me decided to do my research by analyzing specific anti-vaccine groups

posts to see how they try to keep people from getting vaccinated. Doing this helped me writing

my methods section and once I finished my research I was able to write my results, discussion,

and conclusion section. So by learning about writer’s context, I was able to complete an

assignment that made writing the rest of the scholarly article easy for me. I would still struggle

with a concept every now and then, for example it took me a but to understand hot to correctly

code research data, but these slugless were solved quickly and were not as challenging as trying

to understand the concept of a writer’s context.

taking this class, I learned how to correctly code data. I had never had to do that before, but I was

taught how to categorize data by looking for similar patterns. I also learned how write a literature

review. I never knew had to properly display what I had learned from reading several sources,

but taking this class taught me how to do that. I was taught how to look for common patterns and

how to properly address them in writing, by citing the sources they came from. Another thing I

learned was where my place as a writer is. The literature review, as well as the entire scholarly

article assignments have shown me that I am capable of overcoming struggles to produce good

writing. As I said in the last paragraph, it was hard to create the literature review. The entire

scholarly article itself as difficult to write due to its long and tiring length and several individual

sections. But t the end of the day, I believe both pieces were really well written. So, despite my

struggles, I have realized that I can produce good pieces of writing despite challenges. Because

of this, I have been able to see that my place as a writer is a place for those wanting to take on

new challenges.

By learning these new things, this class affirmed my beliefs about writing. I have always

believed that there is not one type of writing. I have believed there is not a single correct way to

write. And these new lessons prove that. The entire scholarly article process is different from any

other form of writing I have ever done. I have been able to see that it doesn’t matter what you

write as long as you give out the proper message. Both helps support my beliefs.

I want to note that this class challenged a perception I had about myself as a writer.

Earlier in this essay I said that I believed my last college English class was easy. In that class I

was introduced into new types of writing, but I was able to learn how to do them quickly. This

helped support my belief that I could easily learn any type of writing. As you can tell by reading
this essay, this belief was not true. Like I said, I struggled to understand the idea of wring

something from a writer’s context and it took me a long time and a lot of work to finally

understand it. So, this class showed me that it will not always be easy to learn new things about

writing.

ENC 1102 was an interesting class. It was unlike any other English class I had taken It made me

have to go through some challenging days. It taught me some new writing concepts. It made me

reflect on my relationship with writing, which would cause me to change some of the beliefs I

had about writing. So, for all the good and bad, I am glad I was able to take this class.

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