I began this comp II class the last semester of my senior year of Oilton Highschool, I have been challenged by each and every paper I have wrote in this class. I have wrote papers about things I have never learned about before and have gained knowledge from these things. I also learned about authors I have never even heard of before, and about genres of writing I have never learned about before. Each of these things that I have learned from this class will help me in the long run and through the rest of my college classes.

            I learned most from project two, the rhetorical analysis essay. I learned what Albert Camus would think about police brutality but not only that, I learned why Albert Camus would think like that. When researching and writing about Albert Camus I learned about someone I had never even heard of and a genre of writing that I had no experience in. I learned what his writings were based on and what he believed in while also learning how to write in the same way as him. 

            My favorite thing to do in this class was to write about police brutality. I got to learn new things about the topic that I had not known before and I also got to learn how to put research into my own words while citing everything correctly. When I began researching police brutality I only had a small amount of knowledge on the topic, that is why I chose it. I got to learn about statistics of where it happens the most, who it happens to, and what we can do to fix it. I also got to put my own thoughts into ways that we can fix it. 

            Before this class my writing skills were not very polished and I did not understand how to properly cite my sources, this class taught me how my sources should be cited in MLA format. I also learned about the plagiarism checker, which was something I had never used before I took this class. This is something that I will use for the rest of my college career in all of my writing assignments. I also learned that this is a very useful tool to make sure that your citations are correct. 

            Another thing I learned about is my ending punctuations and commas. This was something I was not strong in when I began writing my first paper but after reviewing my paper I learned that I needed help with this part of my writing and I was able to ask for help and polish my skills. I am still not the strongest when it comes to commas by I know that I have gotten better since the first paper I wrote. 

            These papers have been the longest papers I have wrote to date and that has taught me how to brainstorm and plan better. When I have wrote in the past I have not planned or brainstormed about my paper because it was not very long and I could just think as I wrote. When I began writing longer papers I had to learn to plan better and think about my paragraphs. I now have learned to plan out each of my paragraphs and think about what I will say in each of those paragraphs. 

            I think this course has taught me many different things and given me many new skills, it has not been my favorite course to take because it challenged me but I know that I needed to be challenged more than I had been in past classes. Overall I think I learned many new things in a very short amount of time and I had to learn how to fix my mistakes. The mistakes I made in this class have helped me learn to become a better writer and also made me learn time management.