Reflective Essay Connor Allen

Connor Allen

English 121

12-3-15

            For my first year in college I was expecting big changes. With the work load and the professors, I expected much and was prepared for the classes. I made goals for myself to accomplish especially in my writing. I have always been told that I am a decent writer and that I have great ideas. I wanted to be able to connect those ideas with my research. I write semi casual and make mistakes with the tone of my writing. My goals were to make my writing easier to understand and follow my ideas better. Another goal was to work on word choice and add better vocabulary in my writing. My third goal was to accomplish papers with ought the stress of overloading myself. I wanted to pace out my papers so that they could have the proper time to be edited and drafted. Goals that I have accomplished would be goals like writing my papers on time and drafting them more frequently. Another goal that I felt I worked on was to add vocabulary that made my essay flow better. One more goal that I felt I reached was my sentence structure. I felt that I made it easier to follow my ideas in my paper. Goals that I still need to work on would be my run on sentences. I seem to write run on sentences a lot and need to work them out. The other goal I made that I didn’t reach was my MLA citations. On my research paper I wrote about hunting and the economy. I was surprised to learn about how much money is received from license sales and federal taxes. I didn’t know that the money from duck stamps went to land conservation. I didn’t know that there were websites that helped promote hunting. Colorado’s website is hug a hunter. I felt the best part of my paper was the way I related my facts to my thesis. I felt every point I made helped draw conclusions back to my thesis. I think I also did well on word choice in my paper I feel that that was good. I think my instructor will like the way I structured my essay. It was full of information and I think having it tie together with my thesis and my main ideas will help make my instructor like my paper. I also feel like my instructor will like the data that was collected, the data is concrete and informs about hunting sales and how it helps the economy. I feel like I stayed somewhat the same with my computer and web skills. I learned how to blog which was beneficial. I learned how to cite sources from online websites. I learned easier ways to type on the paper by focusing on my typing patterns. The research process was a good way to stay focused and gather great data. I enjoy learning new facts about my subject. I didn’t like having to search through multiple articles to find little pieces of data. Things that are easy for me when researching would be the ability to fine reputable sources. Things that are hard for me is trying to find good factual data. I found mostly what I needed. I spent about three hours a week on research looking up my data. I felt that the time restraints were fine for my research paper. The only thing I would do better would be to research more about specific topics that I could include in my essay.  Some hints that I have found that helped me quickly in my research process would be to look at the end of the URL in a website. Websites like .org and .gov are great reputable sources. I would like to have a data base to use when I’m researching data.