Throughout English 165 I learned much about writing for my future academic endeavors. In the course we read about the significance of language, creative writing, and conveying ideas through persuasive means. This allowed me to become better at analyzing the readings and use them for my writings. This helped me with conveying research results and integrating sources through writing a persuasive research paper. This class also gave me strategies for self-improvement, such as bad first drafts, tactics for writing in different styles, and how to get your personality and opinions into your writing. 

The most important thing that I believe that I have learned from this English class is the idea of bad first drafts. In high school I was able to only write one draft and turn that in. With this class I was not able to do that. I was challenged by the curriculum because of that I have rewritten papers and gotten better grades because of it. This is evident with the research paper. When I first started to write this paper, I was very overwhelmed and was having a hard time writing, but then I remembered our lesson on bad rough drafts. After that I just started writing and it was bad, but through rearranging and editing several drafts I got a research paper that I was proud of.

The following is a research paper that I wrote about using placebos in medicine.