Cumulative Reflective Essay

Cumulative Reflective Essay

*Don’t worry about MLA format for this project.

In 4-6 pages (typed, Times New Roman, double-spaced, 12-pt font), write a short paper that analyzes, and makes an argument about, your growth as a writer during Comp 105. In your reflection, you will need to provide demonstrable evidence of said growth. To this end, you will need to describe, quote, and analyze specific moments from the writing you’ve done for Comp 105 over the course of the semester.

Emphasize accuracy rather than showing only accomplishments. Demonstrate your ability to see clearly your strengths and your potential growth areas as a writer. It’s also important to explain as concretely as possible how you’ll recognize future writing situations where you can apply the skills and concepts you learned in this course.

Some guidelines about the paper’s structure:

Begin with a general introductory paragraph that gives your reader some overall sense of the following:
What your relationship with writing was like in high school or some other context before entering COMP 105
What assumptions you had about college writing before taking COMP 105
What you hoped to gain from taking COMP 105
A thesis statement specifying how taking COMP 105 changed (or did not change) your relationship with writing and/or your growth as a writer
In your body paragraphs, you should address the following questions:
What aspects of your writing do you feel needed the most work at the beginning of the semester?
To what extent do you feel you improved in these growth areas?
What terms or concepts that you learned in the class (e.g. exigence, audience, the stasis forms, the rhetorical appeals) helped you to diagnose your problem areas and to improve as a writer?
As you answer the above questions, refer back to specific illustrative moments from your COMP 105 work, citing said moments as evidence of your growth as a writer. Quote and paraphrase moments not only from your final drafts, but also from early drafts that you revised and transformed over the course of the writing process. For instance, a good tactic for a paper like this is to refer to a specific sentence or paragraph from an early draft that needed a lot of work, and then to analyze A) what was wrong with it, B) how you revised that sentence or paragraph, and C) what terms or concepts related to the course helped you to do so.
In your concluding paragraph (or multiple concluding paragraphs) reflect on how the skills and concepts that you’ve learned in this class (again: concepts like exigence, audience, the stasis forms, the rhetorical appeals, etc.) can be used in other, “non-composition class” writing situations. Think hard about how a totally new situation where you will be asked to write will require you to use some (not all) of these skills but in different ways—for example, if you’re asked to write a survey for your boss, or if you’re asked to write a biology/psychology/etc. research paper, or if you’re asked to write a technical report for engineering. Each case is a unique rhetorical situation with a unique exigence; what will you do when you face it?
You’ll be evaluated on the clarity of your writing, the strength of the paper’s organization/structure, and the thoughtfulness and thoroughness of your responses.