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Daniela Zaragoza Reyna
Professor Oscar Martinez III
English 1302-217
12 April 2024
Argumentative Reflection Essay
In the academic research essay, there are a few things I learned. First off, I learned how to write
an argumentative essay. The last time I wrote an argumentative essay was before COVID-19
started infecting everyone around the world, so I was not experienced in writing an
argumentative essay since halfway through that learning experience it had to come to a halt for
global crisis reasons. This article is a learning experience for what I missed out on in high
school; will be a big help that I can use this learning experience for future classes when I need to
write an argumentative essay for either history, psychology, and more classes. I learned that
writing an argumentative essay takes a lot of steps, not only do you have to understand each
source and their argument but you also have to understand how they can complement each other
to create a strong argument. I also learned that even though you have a strong argument you also
need to add a counterargument. At first, I thought counter-arguments were useless but the more
the professor explained why a counterargument was useful and needed the more I understood
why it was called an “Argumentative Essay” It is because two ideas are arguing against each
other. The creation of a research position essay helps me in my research by knowing what is
expected from me when I write an argumentative essay for my future classes. This also helps me
in two ways. This helps me in my writing by knowing how to write an argumentative essay and
approach my argumentative writing tasks in the future by knowing how to go about tying quoted
arguments together to create a powerful argument. The feedback from the conference with my
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instructor helped me identify 2 elements that I needed to fix in my essay. The first element was
that I structured my essay wrong. I was structuring my essay by “intro, body 1, argument 1, body
2, argument 2, body 3, argument 3, conclusion”. When the argument was supposed to be written
in its own separate paragraph. “Intro, body 1, body 2, body 3, counter argument, conclusion”.
With this information in mind, I went back and fixed the structure of my essay to the correct way
it was supposed to be written. Secondly, the conference also helped me by pointing out how my
citations were written wrong. I would write by citations by “(Zhang 2)” when I was supposed to
include the “et, al” since it was not only Zhang that wrote the article. With this in mind, I went
back and fixed the citations by adding “et, al” to all the citations I did not write correctly; to be
able to give proper credit to the individuals who participated in writing the articles. The peer
review with my classmates helped me improve my research position in two different ways.
Firstly, it helped by calling out my incomplete sentences. I did not notice that I had a lot of
incomplete sentences so I went back and changed some incomplete sentences I was not able to
identify while I was writing. Secondly, the second thing that I was able to improve on was
voicing my thesis more since I would only talk about the article and explain it; I would not go
back to how it connects to my thesis statement though. Because of this I went back and fixed the
way I ended my body paragraphs and made it restate/ go back/ connect to my thesis. There were
a few challenging things that I came across as I was writing this essay. The most challenging part
of this assignment for me would be getting the gist of the argumentative essay because since I
had no experience in it because of COVID-19 I had a hard time completing and understanding
how to do it. Secondly, It was also a struggle to tie back to my thesis statement for some reason
since I was more focused on explaining why my thesis was right. The least challenging part of
this essay was using the articles to tie my argument/counterargument together since I had already
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done an exercise for the counter and my arguments it was pretty easy to use what I had prepared
for the essay. Because of this, I did not have to panic about finding what I needed to use for my
sources in my essay, all I had to worry about was my thesis and how to tie my essay together.
