Description
Reflective Essay
Hector J Pantoja
University of Maryland University College
RUNNING HEAD: REFLECTIVE ESSAY 2
I began WRTG 101 with a high school knowledge of grammar and punctuation. I feel
now, that I am at a level that will help me excel in future classes as well as assists other students
in their quest of knowledge.
I believe most of the information I have learned it was based on the tools and resources
available to me. Utilizing the UMUC library was one of the most effective ways for me to learn
about scholarly journals, abstracts, and defined searches for research papers. For each writing
assignment, using the UMUC library vice using an online search engine produced far more
results for scholarly journals, which helped me complete each paper successfully. Other tools I
used were from the weekly discussions and feedback. Listening to others comment on my
discussion topics actually helped the reshape the bodies of my writing assignments. I know now
how to take positive and negative comments and make my writing as a stronger.
One of the most interesting things I have learned in WRTG 101 was the utilization of
APA style. Prior to the class it was something I never knew about, but now I have learned a
great deal and know how to utilize APA style without having to look back at references. I have
seen APA style before but never knew what it was, thanks to this class I am able to identify other
works in APA style. In APA style, the references took me a while to properly document due to
the outline and grammatical changes such as italicized words and commas but thanks to this
class, I found a great way to make sure my references were properly documented.
I have not taken writing classes since high school, which for me is nine years ago. Now
that I am taking this class, I can see and correct many of the grammatical mistakes I have made
RUNNING HEAD: REFLECTIVE ESSAY 3
over the years. Some examples would be when to use whom vise who, and when to use which or
that. The COMFit application online is a tool I found that helped me immensely with the above
examples. Not only did it allow me to learn new things about writing skills, but also I was able
to correct many things I believed to be grammatically right. I am to a level where I believe I can
educate other people on college level writing skills.
When starting this class, I believed that most of the things I would be doing would be
mostly textbook citing. With today’s technology, I realized that utilizing the Internet for
references, footnotes, and other information is more of a primary source than utilizing an
encyclopedia or other books. I also learn that you cannot use everything you see online. With
some papers requiring you not to utilize blogs, and other opinionated works, it became very
important for me to know how to use the UMUC library to search scholarly journals as
references. The concept to Essay three was research, information from other author with the
same topic as mine and combining my thoughts with the other sources. The activities that I did
before writing this essay was almost the same as I did with the first two essays’. I free wrote
then researched many articles, the only thing different was that I was required to choose six
sources. Aside from the problems, I had with essay one and two, new obstacles have risen, like
having to take the information from sources and combining them onto one coherent paper. The
challenge to combine the information was difficult, but was not impossible. I compare all of this
work to doing college courses 30 years ago, where a student would have to go to a library to find
adequate information to support his or her thesis statement.