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Joshua Ikwuagwu

Professor Nolen

ENGL 1301

November 26 2021

My First Semester of English

Something I believe a majority of college students can relate to is the idea of being

slumped with work. Mainly due to procrastination and bad prioritization skills, but nevertheless

we procrastinate a lot. In high school I could get away with delaying assignments until the last

day because teachers always gave extensions, or I could turn in half finished work and still

receive a B+ grade. Although I broke these habits long ago, in English 1301 I discovered I would

need something more than an average amount of effort. I discovered I would need to be

proactive in my writing as opposed to just writing from a base level. In my first essay, I didn’t

even read the prompt, and barely slid by with a passing grade. On my second, my thesis was

poorly written and not understandable, and I didn’t really compare and contrast my examples.

And on the Third essay I made a lot of the same mistakes, I did not explain my rhetors very well,

and my conclusion wasn’t to par. I feel as every essay I wrote I would advance in one way while

regressing in another, until I just tried to hard a hit every check mark, but missed all of them.

My first essay was titled “Has Fat Acceptance affected peoples’ view on Health?”, this

topic was a gold mine. In the essay I talked about journalist and Fat Activist, Aubrey Gordon,

and she disrespected Robert Crawford by grossly misusing his research on Health and

Medicalization to support her own opinion. Then I took to her comment sections for evidence to

prove that Fat acceptance is actually about accepting anything, using too people arguing in the

comments as an example. The issue with this was I was making an argumentative essay, while
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the assignment was a genre analysis. While there was some genre analysis in the essay like on

page 2 “she complains that modern people spend too much time focusing on others health, as if

health is all there is to life. She uses to the term “healthism”, to describe this phenomenon”. That

quote should’ve been used as a genre comparison, to ask a question like “What kind of article is

this based off of her claim and evidence used to prove it?” Or, I could’ve spent an entire

paragraph discussing how common it is for authors to take people words out of context, and

twisting them in a way that makes them seem to support, or even agree with the author’s claim.

These mistakes seemed small when they were pointed out, but as I was revising the essay, I

noticed how much it had drastically changed from its final draft.

My main revision for my first essay was to add more analysis to the genre of article by

using stereotypes Aubrey Gordon displayed throughout her article. To accomplish this, I had to

re-read her article, even though I didn’t want to. After reading it again, with finding potential

genre analysis topics in mind, I found that she projects her opinion onto others quite a few times

in her essay, “she shouldn’t be eating fish while she was pregnant. Just the mention of a

nonapproved pregnancy food had led this person to assume that my coworker was eating it while

she was pregnant, and was therefore endangering the life of her child. It’s a kind of misogyny

and concern trolling that takes its aim at pregnant people regularly.” This is an example of bad

writer’s etiquette; she would be fine if she just speculated what others could’ve meant, or simply

stated exactly what they said with no follow up, but she went as far as to claim they must’ve

meant exactly what she believes they mean, and even insulting them. Another piece of genre

analysis for Gordon was her falsification of the word ‘healthism’. Falsification is when someone

uses another research or idea in a way contradicts its actual meaning. She did this in “it’s a tool

used to further anti-fat bias, yes, but also ableism, transphobia, misogyny, racism, and more.
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Healthism shows up when we joke about getting diabetes from a single dessert, or refer to a rich

meal as a “heart attack on a plate”—implying that those health conditions are caused by failures

of a perceived personal responsibility to be healthy.” The actual definition of healthism is stated

by Robert Crawford in “The concern with personal health has become a national preoccupation.

Ever increasing personal effort, political attention, and consumer dollars are being expended in

the name of health.” Not only did she falsify his quote but she even went as far as to expand it to

wild proportions. These are the analyses I should’ve made in my final draft. At first, I thought I

got to obsessed with the obesity part of the essay, but really, I didn’t spend enough time talking

about the genre and how she’s doing it wrong.

My second essay, titled “The Inclusive Nature of Memes”, was about how memes unite

us in ways we never notice. One problem with this essay was I only compared and contrasted my

example in my conclusion. Instead of linking every single body paragraph back to my thesis I

just said what my example was and continued on, like I was making a list. The largest mistake I

made though was not in my comparing and contrasting, it was my thesis, after all what am I

comparing and contrasting if not to prove something. My thesis was a question asking if memes

do truly bring people together, or divide them further. Instead of asking a question, I should’ve

stated flatly that, yes, memes do bring people of different backgrounds, ages, races, and even

nationalities together. Then I would prove this by maybe adding an extra paragraph or two

showing similarities between my example.

To revise “The Inclusive Nature of Memes”, I changed my conclusion to instead say

“Whether it be in a massive comment debate, or every having a laugh, memes untie people with

their giant white words and awkwardly cut black borders.” I felt like this would be a good way to

state my thesis in a flat method, and it gives an additional meaning to the last sentence of my
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conclusion. To add comparing and contrasting I added paragraphs that talked about how each of

my example could relate with each other. For political memes and the engineering meme, I used

the show “South Park”, and the YouTube channel “Memology”. I compared the South Park

character used in the engineering meme and the shows wacky nature to bridge Memology’s own

usage of the same character and other south park characters and scenes to show that even though

he is from another country even he enjoys political memes, shows like South Park, and

characters like PC Principal. For the gaming post, I used its incredibly diverse comment section

and Memology’s national heritage as a bridge. Not only was the comment section of the gaming

post diverse the post itself, and the companies, which have been the subjects of memes similar

the one being described, are also diverse. For this paragraph I used the diversity in the

comments, and the companies involved. Nvidia was founded by a Taiwanese man, AMD’s CEO

is a Taiwanese woman, South Park is a Canadian show which features a lot of history of not only

North America, but the whole world. I didn’t do this originally because I thought that I could do

this in the conclusion paragraph, but that wasn’t enough.

For my final essay, titled “Can you trust Depressed Teens?”, I didn’t use the vocabulary

from the rhetorical strategies, my thesis could’ve been stronger, missing small things like

grammar and topic sentences. This essay was the easiest the revise because its issues were

mostly surface level and only required me to elaborate what I meant in each paragraph, instead

of writing entire new ones. For rhetorical strategies I stated the doctors’ titles and achievements

were an example of Arete. I said that their professions as pediatricians, and that they were

upfront about some of the doctors being employed by pharmaceutical companies as evidence of

Eunoia. Finally, I used their strategy of trusting children as a lack of common sense, evidence of

a lack of Phronesis. All of these were just Ethos, for Logos I used the statistics they provided
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“There were a total of 102 adolescents, mean age 15.3±1.9 years, included in this study (Table

1). [34%] were boys, 33% were non-white, 17% were classified as Fox et al. Page 3 Clin Pediatr

(Phila). Author manuscript; available in PMC 2018 May 18[….] (mean BMI 30.3 ± 1.9 kg/m2 ),

and 83% as having severe obesity (mean BMI 41.2 ± 7.2 kg/m2 ). In the overall sample, 34%

endorsed symptoms consistent with depression and 32% endorsed symptoms of anxiety. Among

patients with and without depression, 91% and 79% had severe obesity [….] Among patients

with and without anxiety, 94% and 78% had severe obesity.” In the research study I didn’t

expect there to be any pathos, but them trusting the children could’ve been an emotional

decision.

My essays main problems were that they didn’t do an amazing job to justify their thesis. I

made claims yes, but those arguments only make sense to me. To make them into an essay I had

to explain my thoughts to the fullest, while using the prompt as a guide to accomplish this. And

what I learned from feedback on one essay I would use on the next, but the next essay would

have a different prompt that required a more significant change, that I would learn from the

feedback received. This cycle repeated itself twice, and initially I thought it was due to me being

bad at writing essays, but now I’ve come to learn that this is a common practice. Afterall this is

only my first semester of college.

One of the most important things this class has taught me is that making mistakes doesn’t

mean that you’re a failure and its time to dropout. That If you don’t get the A+ you might as well

change your major and give up because there’s no way you’re becoming a nurse, doctor, lawyer,

or engineer. English taught me that I’m going to screw up sometimes, but that doesn’t mean I

have to be bad forever. That’s why we did reflection after every essay, and in each of my

reflections I commented on how I did something different this time, something that makes it
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better than the last essay. Even though all of my essays go the same grade I still learned from

them. I learned the importance of staying on topic from “Has Fat Acceptance affected peoples’

view on Health?” I learned that I need to be more direct with my claim and its evidence from

“The Inclusive Nature of Memes”, and I also learned to immediately connect evidence to my

claim. I learned to view information from different perspectives from “Can you trust Depressed

Teens?”, and to look for more than one method in problem solving. I learned a lot from these

essays despite not getting the best grade on them.

At the start of the semester, I figured this would be an easy class that I wouldn’t have any

difficulty with, but after getting the same grade on each essay I wrote, and receiving wildly

different feedback for each of them, I feel that was the understatement of the year. This class has

been an eye-opening event for what college is supposed to be, a learning experience. Most think

of upper-level education as a ticket to a decent paying job, but that ignores the meaning of it. We

are here to learn new things, meet new people, and have new experiences, whether they be

education related or not. I can say with confidence that this class prepared me well for the rest of

my college life, through teaching me the value of not only patience in growth, but also good

criticism.