Final Reflective Exam

          I have learned a lot of different and effective ways of writing while taking this course. There are many strategies to use when prewriting an essay and I tried to use each of them at least once so I could figure out which worked best for me. Free writing is something that I had never tried before, but I found myself using it a lot while prewriting my rough drafts for this class. I learned about pathos, ethos, and logos and how they can be used in an essay.
          You are a very laid-back instructor and your way of teaching helps everyone understand the importance of the topic we are learning. Your comments about our essays are both helpful and encouraging. It is refreshing to see that you can praise our essays, but also give constructive criticism to help us do better on our next paper.
          The least thing I like doing in this course, is the peer review response. I agree that the peer reviews give good feedback on your papers, but I didn't really see the point in making a peer review response. I always had a hard time writing them, because I didn't know what to write. I usually made whatever changes I needed to make, including some of the suggestions the peer review had given.
          The writing assignment that I enjoyed doing the most has to be the argument essay. I did mine on the safety of vaccines. I enjoyed doing the research on the link between autism and vaccines. I had already done some reading on the subject prior to writing the essay, because the subject has always interested me. It is such a controversial subject, but it is definitely hard to ignore when the safety of children is at stake.
          I don't think that I would do anything differently if I was retaking this course, because I think I did pretty well this semester, considering how long it had been since I actually tried to write an essay. I had always been interested in writing when I was in high school, so you can imagine my surprise when I started to struggle at writing the first essay we had to do. After writing that first essay, I could feel myself getting back into the swing of things again. Learning the different techniques of writing also helped me get the essays started.
          Thank you Mr. Jaynes for being a great teacher and making this semester a great learning experience!