How Will my Reflection Show, How I Write to You Guys?

This is a paper that I had written for my criminal justice in English course at my previous college. The paper is a reflection on what I had learned, how the writings had helped me, and which of the writings was my favorite.

Participles

Absolutes 

Appositives

Adjectives

Active Voice

Passive Voice 

This quarter has really been interesting to me and surprisingly I learned some new things that have never really had an impact until now. Entering into this course I knew very little about how to research a topic, especially a topic within the criminal justice system. Now I realize how scholars feel when they conduct their research. Research is a very difficult task because you have to find the information that is useful for supporting your subject. I learned a lot within this course about research, including how to properly use the databases to find information, as well as scholarly journals.
    My identity has changed dramatically this quarter because I have become experienced with writing researched based articles. Before this class my knowledge pertaining to research articles was very shy. I’m not going to lie, when it came down to writing the literature review I felt unprepared, mainly because I had psyched myself up for it. Once I had started writing it, the process seemed to just jolt right along. Out of all the papers I had written, I think that my strongest paper had to have been the background essay because I was more familiar with writing those and it was really well structured. The only way to write these papers was to not procrastinate, but also once you start push yourself to keep moving.
    All of the assignments allowed for me to get a better understanding on how to take the information received and put it into your own article. The Stanford prison experiment I believe had to have been the most obvious researched based film. It showed that a lot of research must be conducted before a research question can be solved. Within this video it also provided examples of the research process through secondary research.
    I really enjoyed doing peer reviews because you are giving your insights on how others can perfect their articles, while also being critiqued as well. While writing out reviews I was very cautious on how the comments I made could help the reviewer with both likes and dislikes. When any of my papers came back to me after being reviewed I felt gratitude because it informed me on how I could fix any mistakes, or even go into more discussion on a certain issue. It also gave me an idea of what interests the reader has and what they would like to learn more about.
    The argument probably was my favorite piece of writing in the final research article. This is because it was all about my word against theirs while setting up a trial and error process. It also allowed for me to support my thesis by providing examples and statistics. It reintroduced some of the previous claims and summed it all up with an analysis. By writing out an argument, my research question had been restated and provided answers to it.
    I learned a lot of new techniques this quarter and I hope that I will be able to take what I learned and apply it to papers in the future. One of the most important things I learned throughout this class was that everything requires some form of research no matter what it is. Well I’m actually going into the field of screenwriting, so I would really like to apply some of what I learned into this. I believe that if I am to keep practicing these newly learned skills, there will be much more I can gain and expand upon. As much as I enjoyed researching malpractice, I don’t think I am going to continue researching the topic, just because I don’t feel that there is much I can take away from it. I think that if I am persistent with reading and researching, those will allow for me to become a better writer, as well as boost my confidence.
    This class was very well structured and I was able to learn a lot throughout this course. However, I think that if you were to add secondary research to the list for the final research article, I would imagine that students could take a lot more away from this class as to gaining a new outlook on researching. The secondary research may consist of interviews, conducting surveys, job shadows, or anything else the students can think up. I also have to mention that on the first day I was a little afraid of your class and was thinking “oh no, what have I gotten myself into”. Later on throughout this quarter I realized that this actually helped in bettering my understanding for research based papers. So I thank you for that.