What I've Learned so Far

I feel like I’ve learned a lot from these past two essays. First of all, at the beginning of the year I would’ve sworn by the fact that advertisements don’t actually have a huge effect on us. I even wrote my summary strong response on this because I was so confident in that fact. However, after writing the image analysis, I started to realize how much advertisement has shaped the way we look at our world and view society. I wrote my image analysis on diamond ring advertisements and it became so clear to me why our social perception of the need to have a diamond ring before marriage was so strong. I also came to understand that advertisements aren’t random; everything that is put in an ad is in their for a reason, and they are really good at attracting the people they want to attract.

I also felt like I learned the skill of opening my mind by writing the sex education essay. I guess sex education wasn’t something I really thought about, and my position before the paper was very narrow minded. I thought that parents should teach their children and there should be a strong emphasis on abstinence. However, while in the process of writing this paper I realized that I had to consider so many different things, like, whether or not a child even had parents. This helped me to have an open mind about the topic, and has helped me to look at other controversial issues more critically.