Andrew Arboleda

Ms. Julia Remsik

English 110

12/10/17

Learning Reflection on ENGL 110

When first starting English 110, I was nervous, I didnt know what to expect. I arrived late to

class, and when everyone looked at me my face flushed red, I was embarrassed, no way was I going to

have a fun time in this class. I sat down in the only seat available; the corner seat. I felt isolated, alone,

nobody in this room was in my major, there were education majors, art majors, film majors, but I was a

civil engineer major. I didnt feel like I belonged, it took me a long time to even attempt to talk to

Victoria, or as everyone else called her; Tori.

Tori was the first person to jumpstart me in my growth for the English language, she showed me

how it was important to be honest with other people. I was an introvert in a class full of extroverts, so

hearing her say that sounded very comforting to me. Before in classes, I had to pretend to be someone

else that people would like. However, with Tori, I could be myself, and that was extremely important for

me. With our first LSA, it was her who made me as honest with myself as I was. In our SLO(E), we were

told that we were expected to realize how using other forms of dialect, language and registers was

beneficial to our papers. Well, before LSA0, I wasnt even comfortable with being myself. I was never

true to my thoughts in my papers. But after turning in LSA0 and getting the most effective and useful

feedback on it, I realized how important it was to have your own dialect in your papers. When you

pretend to be a writer that isnt really you, you can never really improve on your own writing style.

Writing in your own style and improving upon that is really the only way to grow overall in writing.

Now that I was feeling better with myself, I found that I was being more social, I began to be

honest with everyone, in all my classes. It wasnt scary at all like how I expected it would be. It was like a
change of pace. Instead of spending energy to avoiding people, I spent it on meeting people. I started to

incorporate this into my writing after seeing SLO(B) because before, my discourse communities that I

wrote to were addressed only to the local people in my classroom. I never ventured farther than that, I

was afraid of being shut down because my papers would sound too emotional for the masses. But based

on my performance of my LSAs, I grew confident in myself, and the review I wrote for O Ramen, or

MWA3, was the first time I expanded my discourse community to the entire city in which I lived in. it

wasnt just focused to my classmates anymore. Writing for a larger discourse community showed just

how much more careful I needed to be to make sure I appealed to everyone. I wasnt as selective with

what I wrote, instead I wrote about everything. Every little detail that I thought of I made sure to

incorporate into my review. And what came out of that work was something truly amazing. My review

sounded as If I would be speaking to you in a conversation, it was in my dialect, my language, but it was

like I was speaking to everyone at once, no matter who read it, they could understand exactly what I

was talking about. They felt exactly what I felt when I was in that restaurant, and that made them want

to eat there, which was the whole intent for my review.

I feel like the time when I most improved in English 110 was during my time working in AEJ, or

the Andrew-Eric-Jessica group for short. In previous English classes, I never had to work with other

students, I always worked alone, I always wrote by myself, but now I must write and collaborate with

other people to make a paper. In SLO(C) our course outcome explained that we must know how to take

different approaches to gathering information and writing depending on the type of paper we were

writing. Well, for this report, I feel like we all learned exactly how to do that. Everyone had a different

idea to write our paper, but instead of arguing we worked together and worked on how we could take

everyones ideas and incorporate it into the report. We did online research, empirical research, even a

little bit of personal research. We opened the paper up to each person, so they could proofread and edit

it whenever they saw a need to. We used everyones ideas so that no one would feel left out.
 That wasnt all we learned while doing MWA2 though, as SLO(A) says, we must analyze and

compose and reflect on arguments in a variety of situations so that we know what type of genre and

writing style we need for our rhetorical situation. When we were discussing who our report would be

written too, we also discussed how our report would need to be written differently. If we were to have

it addressed to the city of Albuquerque, we needed it to be more formal than we were making it, but

because we were addressing it to the students of UNM, we needed to make sure that we had their voice

in our paper. That meant having to have an emphasis on empirical research coming straight from New

Mexico students. To do this, we directly took surveys to UNM students at areas where our topic was an

issue, if the person wasnt a UNM student, we didnt ask them to take our survey. It was important that

we had the students voices heard in our report, so that the other students could see just how much of

their colleagues felt about the issue. If it wasnt for us reviewing other already made arguments about

transportation on campus from other universities, we may not even have had the empirical research in

our paper. However, having this research in our paper made our report extremely solid towards our

audience and was very effective at reporting the issue of transportation on campus.

Another of our slos, SLO(F) describes that we must realize how composing in different genres

and writing styles can be used in other forms of work. What better way to end a reflection then

understand how I can use this knowledge and use it in other subjects? Throughout English class, I had

Engineering labs that I was writing, halfway through the semester, I noticed that with the knowledge in

English class, I could improve my lab reports. I went more in depth with each report, focused on points

that I knew my professor would appreciate, and overall made 90% reports into 100% lab reports. I

continue to use my writing skills in my lab reports, and now that Im going into more writing oriented

classes, I fully expect to use my English knowledge there as well. If it wasnt for learning the things I

learned in English 110, I would have never gotten 100% labs, or knew how to write for my audience. I

would have made my papers weak, untruthful with how I felt, and overall bad if I didnt listen and learn
in this class. But now that Im here, reviewing what Ive done, I can safely say that I know how to write

for all my classes. And Im confident in it, which was my goal in LSA0. Thank you for being my friends,

and my teachers, to all of English 110, thank you for making me a better writer.