Reflection Essay

Reflection Essay
Many college students often work in groups on projects and papers. This is because it is proven to help them to get used to real world and learn to cope and work well with all different kinds of people. For example in English 101, students are asked to get in groups, choose three questions in which all have a common theme and each person write a paper answering the question. Then the students will collaborate there papers to answer a bigger question they think of that has to do with all three questions. The collaboration process seems to be somewhat tedious. It can take a while to come up just with ideas and titles then the writing process can take even longer.
I am in English 101 and asked to do the collaborative essay. The initial paper was not that difficult. The question I decided to answer was, “How can making up the truth be a positive thing?” and the two other questions in my group all had to do with what is true and what is not. When it came around to the collaboration process, it took quite a while to think of just the question which we decided was, “How does one’s recollection of an event shape what is true in history?” Once that was out of the way we had to decide what points in each of our own essays were strong and how we could use those points to help answer the bigger question. The rest of the paper consisted of us attempting to make the points flow and explanations strong enough so the paper was readable.
The way that we were able to find common ground worked out very nicely. We were able to brainstorm what we were doing and come up with the best way we thought we could write a collaborative essay. We understood what we needed to have in the essay to make it the easiest to follow without being the class. Our collaborative essay was made of all of our ideas and main points in our papers. We tried to be as detailed as we could without repeating what was in our three individual papers. We tried to come up with a title that would help readers get an understanding of what was going on in the entire essay. We also tried to think of words that would get our points across more effectively which we found made out paper a lot more entertaining than before and not as repetitive as it would have otherwise been.
As a group, we decided that the best way to help our readers fully comprehend our main points was to incorporate the facts from our paper that seemed to have to most value. We used details from essays and short stories in our class book, “The First Year Composition Reader.” Our group thought that with examples from a text, quotes and explanations we were able to put our point across. Our points were stated and we tried not to give too much away from each of our individual papers. The collaborative essay is explained well and fully.
There were some decisions we had to make that we knew could either make or break our essay. Some points we decided to change around a bit so that it would make more sense to the readers. One example of this is when were attempting to state how each person has their own different interpretation on an event. At first we had four or five different sentences in which when we read it out loud just did not prove the point we wanted it to make so we had to do a lot of revision while writing the paper. The whole decision process can result in making the paper a terribly under explained answer to a question that has to do with nothing, so we attempted to brainstorm as much as we could before we actually started writing. Our paper would have turned out completely different if we did not do this. We probably would not have explained anything as much and our paper would have been very choppy. When we sat down and started making these decisions we were unsure at first how detailed we should be. I feel that we were detailed enough for having to write an introduction essay, however after talking with our teacher, I realized we could have gone in to much more detail so that all points expressed in each of our individual papers would have been touched on and understood, instead of just the main points in each of our papers.
The paper we wrote as a group has a sense of worthiness when answering the question. It might not be a professionally written piece of work, but it does have points that are explained well. They probably could be a bit more developed but for a first draft of a paper it answers the question at hand and does a good job at it. The readers will be able to understand the answer to our main question, maybe without even reading it. The reader may say we could use a bit more, however overall it does answer the question and explains our main points with detail and example.
There were some parts of the process where we needed to remind each other what the main question actually was. There were parts in the writing portion that we sometimes found that we were starting to drift off and were not fully on topic. It is easy while writing an essay to find yourself way off topic and having paragraphs of nonsense in which you will then have to cut and basically start all over again.
The collaboration process has given me the time to work with others and see how my peers write. This has helped me somewhat improve my own papers by showing me ways that others answer the same questions. I feel that with the whole collaboration process I have become a better writer and the process has forced me to understand that my papers do not always flow well and do not always explain themselves the way I though they did while I was writing them. The idea of working with people who have a different sense of writing styles can help students think outside the box the next time the write a paper. It helps to allow students to experience a variety of ways to help explain their points in different ways instead of just writing the same repetitive papers.