Reflective Essay

I enrolled in Comp two with Tulsa Community College for the second semester of my senior year. I was hesitant to enroll because English is not my strong suit. Even so, I have learned a lot throughout my Comp two class which has helped me in other college and high school classes. I wrote two project essays for this class, one about a solution to an epidemic and one about how an absurdist author would feel about my epidemic and if it was considered one. They had one thing in common for these two completely different prompts: Zombies.

I have had to work much harder than my classmates in all of my English classes throughout high school, seeing as writing does not come naturally to me. However, my past courses had yet to prepare me for the work I would have to put into a college English class. This class pushed me academically, forcing me to separate my essays into several pieces. Breaking the paper into several pieces allowed me to notice my grammar and spelling errors and fix them before submitting my work. Breaking the essays into pieces helped raise my overall percentage on all of my papers. After getting back my grade from the first essay, my confidence was boosted because I had never done that well on an essay. After the first essay, I just continued getting better and better.

Throughout high school, I have always had a problem with correctly formatting MLA. However, this class helped me break down and understand MLA format. Having a clearly explained outline to set up a works cited page was nice. Learning how to cite in-text on more difficult sources like movies, books, and websites was also very helpful. I have never plagiarized a paper, but having the SafeAssign checker for all of our projects and assignments was also nice. I used this to check to make sure what I sourced was correctly sourced. I submitted my paper, let SafeAssign check it, and then looked at the highlighted sentences to see if I had sourced them correctly.

This semester I learned an entirely new genre, absurdism. Absurdism was a difficult concept to understand completely, but I finally grasped the concept towards the end of this course. Absurdism was difficult for me because it is unlike any other genre I have studied before. In most genres, every problem has a solution. In absurdism, however, there is often no solution to the story's major problem. At the end of the semester, I gained respect for the genre of absurd literature. I realized that absurdism reflects the chaos of this world and shows the reality that there is very seldom a happy ending to the story. Absurdism is more realistic than other literary genres, which made me respect it.

This class pushed me as a student and helped me grow my English skills. More specifically, this class helped me grow by teaching me how to format and cite my papers properly. This class has pushed my grammar and comp skills to a whole new level so that I could make myself a better student. I intend to take these newly found research and writing skills to the next level with me. Professor Hammett is a fantastic English teacher. She is great with students and is excellent to work with throughout the semester.