Ramírez Carrillo 1

Karina Ramírez Carrillo

ENGL 1302 261

Professor Trishia Briones

May 5, 2023

Final Reflection Essay

The most important thing I learned in this course was how to research correctly and

the amount of time that an adequate research process could take. Now I understand that

writing is not as simply as reading one time without processing and writing whatever come

to my mind after reading and taking some random aspects that I captured on my mind. To

correctly write an essay is important to read and proofread, understanding the information

and analyzing it. I also learned to categorize my sources, and to identify when a source was

useful and when it wasn’t useful or trustful. I understood how to do correct in-text citations

to avoid plagiarism or any copying. I understand that working on a single topic is hard, and

it could take a whole semester to write a single good essay. Is important first to read your

sources and select what works and what is not useful. The annotated bibliography was

really useful to do the second essay, because it was easier to go back to the annotated

bibliography than to go back and read the whole 10 articles. Then the importance to

identify and divide what is the information provided by your sources and what are your

opinions. I think that the whole writing process is going to be useful on any of my future

courses, specially on my WIN courses, or most probably on my masters because I have

experienced that writing and researching about music has a similar process.

To correctly write an essay you have to follow a writing process. The first thing I

learned for the writing process is that brainstorming your ideas is important before starting

to look for your sources. At the beginning of the semester I knew what I wanted to write
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about that was K-dramas, but for writing a research paper I needed a more specific topic.

Brainstorming my ideas helped me to understand which were the different options I had to

write about and the different focuses I could take. After having a specific topic it was

important to be careful choosing my sources. I used Google Scholar to be more confident

about the reliability of my sources but even though I used a trustful database, no all the

sources I found were useful, I understood that not every article was a peer-reviewed article

and that not every peer-reviewed article had valid authors. I also understand how to be

biased or unbiased about topics that probably I don’t prefer, an example is when we did the

debate in class about random topics and with little time to prepare. That activity helped me

to understand also the importance of time management and organization, because we only

had a few minutes to get ready with an unknown topic. This was also applicable to the first

and second genre papers, because we were not allowed to add our opinions until the last

essay. It was a good knowledge that can actually be applicable to other course because it is

a way of reading more analytically and just looking for the information and being neutral

about it, being open to other options and opinions.

Reading and revising one of my essays after a long time made me realize about

some aspects that I did not realized before. Reading again out loud made some paragraphs

of my essay sound dumb and nonsense because of the run-on sentences or the wrong

choose of vocabulary. There were also a lot of incomplete ideas and a lot of rhetorical

resources that I use wrong. I was able to notice more mistakes than the first time I read it

and I was able to notice that I wrote it in a hurry without the correct time management

because of some obvious mistakes. When I revised it for this final revised essay one of the

changes I did was to modify the order how I place a lot of the information to make it have

more sense and fluency while reading it. I choose to revise my Annotated Bibliography and
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one thing I did the first time is that I forgot to add in-text citations that could be helpful on

the process for my Literary Analysis, the second genre essay, that why this time I decided

to wrote more of the author’s words to make connections. I also went more into detailed in

the information to be able to differentiate one source of the other. The sources talked about

the same topic and while I was trying to summarize the information it resulted on similar

texts that made hard to identify one source from the other. I corrected the way I was citing

because at the begging of the semester I did not understand the way of doing it and I

learned how to do it during the semester.

The most challenging part of revising the Annotated Bibliography was that as it was

the first genre that we wrote in the semester, it was easy to confuse all the information from

the different articles that I read overall the semester. As all the sources talked about K-

drama’ influence and most of them were focused on the psychological impact some of the

sources’ information was similar and it was easy to confuse the information and articles

while I was trying to rewrite the information and add the citations. Some of the sources

even used the same Korean dramas as example and that made me mixed the opinions from

the authors. Another thing I realized, is that I caught myself adding my opinions on the

essay when you are not supposed to do so while writing an Annotated Bibliography,

because the Annotated Bibliography is basically a summary of the sources. The least

challenging or the fun part was that after doing all the work of the semester, and reading the

articles a lot of times, they were already highlighted with the most important information,

or I remember the most important points of the articles even though I confused the

information and articles sometimes. It is ironic because the same thing that gave me

headaches by confusing the information was the same thing that helped to found my way

back. That is why it was not that necessary to deepen on reading the articles, because I
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already had the highlights of the article and I knew the information that was and not useful

from each article and I remembered where to find it with a quick read.

As our websites are going to be open to everybody with Internet access, there is the

possibility, as the professor mention, that some people will not know academic concepts

that we learn through the semester, such as what is a genre or what is the difference

between the three genre essays that we did throughout the semester: the Annotated

Bibliography, the Literature Analysis and the Research Position. This is why, as it was

indicated in class, throughout my website you would see some small paragraphs before the

documents, images or videos explaining why that information is relevant for the research or

explaining on what does the section consists about, like defining what is an Annotated

Bibliography or explaining why I added the videos I added on the Audio-visual Resources

section. There is also many people do not really understand some concepts specifically

related to my research topic: K-dramas, or psychology terms; because not everybody

interested on psychology is a K-drama fan and not everybody that likes K-dramas is

interested on Psychology. That is why on my explanations I used more common vocabulary

to mention hard or non-common concepts and I simply explained or defined the concepts

either on my website or inside my essays. An example of this is when I talked about

parasocial relationships, I explained that they were one-sided relationships generated by

the audience with the characters, or when I mentioned in my essays the saeguk dramas, I

defined the on my essays as a mixed of historical and romantical dramas.

The most challenging part of the course was being able to manage and organize my

time but the hardest activity of the course was when I had to revise either my work or my

classmates’ work during the peer-review activities. I was not able to detect wrong use of

vocabulary or grammar errors, and it was even harder to identify bigger structural mistakes,
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the part that was easier for me while correcting was correcting the format. For me, this was

mostly due to the language barriers, but it was even harder while revising my classmates’

work because as them being native speakers, their vocabulary was bigger than mine and in

consequent harder to read, and that mixed with my dyslexia sometimes took me a big effort

to read over and over again to be able understand a single phrase. On comparison it was

harder with a little amount of time in class, because at home when I was reading the articles

or correcting myself, I was able to look for every single word that I did not know or

understood. Also, correcting my own grammar was hard because I caught myself

translating literally from Spanish to English, and not only the vocabulary but also the

sentences structures, and that made harder and longer the process for me to revise my work

and corrected because a lot of times it sounded correct for me but it was not correct.

Another thing that was challenging was trying to stay unbiased on the first two essays, it

was hard to detect when I used my opinion, but I was still able to corrected.

The least challenging part overall the semester, was at the begging with the first

genre essay. It was fun and easy looking for, finding sources and reading about them,

because in this course we were able to choose a topic that we enjoyed, and that made the

research process fun. Aside from being the least challenging part, the opportunity to

research about a topic that I like and enjoy learning about, made me realize that besides of

the lack of English vocabulary and grammar understanding I was actually able to

understand what I read in English when I am having fun or when I enjoy what I am reading.

This course made me realize that I actually enjoy researching, and that writing was a

problem for me when I did not understand what I was talking or reading about; it was just

that I never got the chance to choose and research about something that I liked. I also

realized that while I was reading, as I was paying close attention, I learned some new words
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for my vocabulary and I also started to notice some verbal tense modes and understanding

them while reading, and this made me improve also my communication skills. Another

thing that I found least challenging was getting the main points. Usually as I have a low

level of dyslexia and low understanding of the language, is hard for me to get an overall

concept of a text or to get the important concepts, but reading about things I liked made me

focused more and helped me to capture the important information.

I would not say that I am ready to be part of the academic research community

because my English language abilities are still lacking, but this course did build the path for

it. I might not be ready to professionally write essays or to correct others people papers but

I know the process for it, I know how to make a plan to research correctly, I know the time

it takes and the correct ways to research, how to identify good sources and how to

recognize when a source that may help to my opinion is not useful because is not trustful. I

might consider myself ready for the academic research community in a couple of years,

hopefully before I start a masters program, at the moment that I can consider myself in a

good academic level of English language.