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Alex Lobitz

Professor Beadle

English 115

7 December 2020

Reflection Essay

Throughout the semester, my writing has improved significantly in a variety of ways.

Throughout middle school and high school, I never fancied myself a good writer, at least not

good enough to write the kind of papers I’ve seen college students write in the past. People said

my writing was good and I got decent grades, but I never felt like I fully knew what I was doing.

It was as if every paper that received a high grade was just another fluke, and I feared that once I

got to college, my luck would run out. For the first time, I feel like I really understand what

makes my essays good and what can make them lacking, and how to apply new skills for writing

at a college level. The three main projects we did, project space, project text, and project media,

all contributed in different ways to improving both my writing and my understanding of it. In

project space, I learned to analyze and use rhetoric, with project text I learned how to research

academic sources as well as establish effective counter arguments, and in project media I feel

like I brought all of those skills together to craft the best essay of the three.

Project space taught me both how to analyze rhetoric in other people’s work and how to

include it in my own. By comparing the three essays from ​Waves​, I decided that Pangilinan’s

article “Safe Space” made the strongest use of rhetoric. Where the other two articles included

only two of the three main rhetorical strategies, Pangilinan managed to make use of logos, ethos,

and pathos in their arguments. By studying “Safe Space” in particular, I learned the importance

of including all three of these strategies into my arguments, and how to do so effectively.
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Pangilinan’s article incorporated logos by including a couple important statistics illustrating real

issues LGBTQ students face on college campuses, giving readers a tangible problem to mentally

chew on while they read “Safe Space.” I employed a similar strategy in my analysis of the film

Parasite​ for project media, by including the statistic of wealth distribution in South Korea, where

10% of the population holds 44% of the wealth. This illustrates the issues the Kim family faced

in the film, and how it reflects the plight of a growing lower class in Korea. Pangilinan included

numerous sources to back up their claims about the struggles of LGBTQ students on college

campuses, to establish a position of authority to support their arguments. While I didn’t cite quite

as many sources in project media as Pangilinan, I did include two additional sources to back up

my points about the growing wealth gap in South Korea, and the squalid semi-underground

living situations poor families have to endure in Seoul. Pangilinan incorporated a strong element

of pathos in their article, using the overall LGBTQ community to evoke an emotional response,

by showing that they’re discriminated against on college campuses, and safe spaces are

sometimes “the only place where they can feel safe.” In a similar fashion, I used the struggles of

the lower classes in South Korea to establish a pathos appeal, showing how the abject squalor the

Kim family faces reflects millions of Koreans that genuinely have to suffer through this poverty

crisis currently happening.

I also learned an important lesson about essay structure through actually writing the

project space essay itself. During my visit at the LRC, the writing tutor told me that I need to

break up my paragraphs more, since nobody wants to read a wall of text. Throughout high

school, nearly all of my essays included walls of text like this, they’d become a staple of my

writing style. By making such a simple fix as structuring my essays around shorter paragraphs

and/or simply splitting up the long paragraphs I already had, my writing skills have been
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dramatically improved. Another significant issue that was brought up in the feedback for the

essay was that too many of my paragraphs were simply summary, and didn’t directly contribute

to supporting my thesis. This has also changed the way I think about essay structure, by showing

me that I need to cut out the fat that appears in most of my essays and include material that

directly supports my thesis, instead of purely contextualizing my arguments. In the final draft for

project media, for example, I cut out my long summary of the plot in my intro paragraph, in

favor of a snappier introduction that led more directly into the arguments I made in my essay.

Project text taught me one major skill through writing it, college level research. It’s not

even a question that I’ll be asked to write numerous research papers throughout my college

career, so being able to find credible, academic sources to support my arguments is essential.

Gone are the days where I could just find random news articles through google and that would be

good enough. I needed to learn how to locate credible and effective sources, preferably not

through google, and through an academic database. At CSUN, we’re fortunate enough to have

free access to one, and through this I managed to find two strong sources for the project text

essay. One was a dissertation by a cultural studies professor at the University of Toronto, and

one is a book by a recognized English professor at the University of Minnesota, the professor

noted on one of my assignments that these were very interesting, relevant sources. I also used

these research skills in project media, my finding a study that illustrates the enormous wealth gap

in South Korea, and an article that delves into the lives of poor Koreans who live in

semi-basement apartments.

The skills I’ve learned and honed in this class, through project space and project text, and

which culminated in project media, will help throughout the rest of my college career. Essay

structure is something I’ve struggled with since middle school, and the simple realization that I
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need to structure my essays around shorter, more concise arguments has dramatically improved

my structure. The research skills I learned through writing project text will also aid my

throughout college, where research papers are common in nearly every class. Overall, the writing

skills I gained in English 115 will not only make my college writing better, but will improve my

writing skills for the rest of my life, and I’m glad I took University Writing as my first college

english course.
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Works Cited

Pangilinan, Ranzen. “Safe Space or Wasted Space?” ​WAVES: A collection of Student

Essays, ​edited by Amy Reynolds and Ambre Norwood, 3rd ed., Macmillan Learning,

2020, pp. 60-62.

Joon-ho, Bong, director. ​Parasite​. Neon, 2019

Shin, KY. A new approach to social inequality: inequality of income and wealth in South Korea.

J. Chin. Sociol.​ 7, 17 (2020). ​https://doi.org/10.1186/s40711-020-00126-7

Kim, Victoria. "Lives and Dreams Below the Street; the Banjiha Home, Featured in 'Parasite,' is

Only for the Desperate."​ Los Angeles Times,​ Feb 13, 2020​. ProQuest​,

https://libproxy.csun.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.libproxy.csun.edu/docvie

w/2353886276?accountid=7285

Posadas, Baryon Tensor. “Double Fictions and Double Visions of Japanese Modernity.”

University of Toronto​, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2010.

“Chapter I: Monster Theory.” ​Monster Theory Reading Culture​, by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen,

University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 3–25.