Reflecting on my Semester:

Writing has never been my strongest area in school and to this day is nowhere near my strongest area. I have always felt I could never get what I wanted to say down on paper because it either didn’t make sense or what I write on paper doesn’t fully represent what my thoughts on the topic is. Getting my ideas and thoughts onto paper is an area while writing I struggled with. I have so many things I wanted to say but I can’t seem to put it into words for my reader to understand. All I wanted to do in high school was to write about something I was interested in instead of something someone told me to do and forced upon me every chance they got. In high school I disliked writing because I felt forced to write an essay with a time limit, restrictions and the pressure of whether my teacher would think it’s good. This made my dislike essays for a while and made me detached from every essay I wrote till this day. It was the only way, I can write so many essays throughout the week and kept up with my class. My pass experiences with essays have affected the way I write essays today, but over time as I continue to practice my writing skills I hope to improve and eventually change this way of writing.

In this semester I learned that when you are detached from your writing piece it is greatly reflected throughout the essay and hurts the essay rather than help build the essay. One thing I can say about this semester is that writing is easier when I know who my audience is and the purpose behind the essay. This became clearer as we learned about rhetorical situations. At first, I didn’t find the importance in using these rhetorical situations but as we kept writing other essays, I saw that these situations are important to have and to remember because they can serve a guide through the essay. With the use of these situations I was able to improve the way I write essays, because I am more aware that the way information is presented to the reader can be clear or misunderstood. Focusing on the way it’s going to be interpret has helped with many other essays because I am writing for the reader to clearly understand what I’m talking about.

Throughout this course I can say I have struggled with a couple of essays in different ways. For example, I struggled with the Work view Life essay because at first, I had personalized the essay which was the point of the essay and I did not. This was hard because I didn’t feel comfortable in writing about what I think about life and work when I have never done anything like that before. This was something new, weird and interesting because I learned that it’s important to personalize essays because Is the part that makes it your own rather than an informative piece. The Work view Life view made me feel out of my comfort zone because at first, I was hesitant to tell someone I just met what life is to me and what work means to me. This was a new experience which helped me with future essays.

I came across with a challenge while writing the Research Critical Analysis because I felt that I wrote the paper for a grade and a professor rather than reflecting on myself. This was challenging because the course made me more confused on the expectation of the paper was and what was required of me to do in the essays. This course made me feel stuck as I kept questioning the major I want to pursue in the future. Many of the feedback I received made me feel like I did in high school, where I had no creative freedom and had to try and create my paper so that my professors would like it. I wanted to define everything because I felt that doing his allowed my reader to understand the course, the process we completed through the semester and it would help my paper to flow. But through my feedback one person will tell me I needed it, and another would say I didn’t need it because the professor is you reader. Being told so many different things by a professor then taught something else made me feel stuck. I decide to make it the way I want to and have an audience that was not only the professor. This course has taught me value lessons of utilizing skills to improve my writing.

Throughout the semester I was introduced to the course learning outcomes which were goals that I would reach at the end of the course. I believe these course learning outcomes helped in the development of my writing. The course learning outcomes I focused on that helped me in my writing was recognized and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations and Explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations. Both of these outcomes complement one another have helped development through rhetorical situations. In class the rhetorical situations- purpose, audience, genre, exigences, stance and media/design were always explained to us and many times we took class time to break down every section so that everyone fully understood what each rhetorical situation meant and what you should focus on under each. These situations help me personalize my first essay lots because it made me understand that the reader wants to know where I stand on certain ideas and what I think about other ideas rather than an informative essay that I am detached from.

Another course learning outcome that has helped developed my writing is develop strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing. Completing revisions in class and having someone other than yourself read your paper has help me understand the importance it holds in the steps to complete an essay. In class we viewed a video from ted talk which was called “The Magic of Revision” by Obert Skye in which he speaks about the importance the revision step is for a writing piece. This video helped me change the ways I think about revising because it made me see that it can change the essay lots if I just take time out of my day to go over the essay and have someone else go over it. In the video Skye’s did a good job of making you feel like you could relate to him with the video because he spoke about revision the same way I used to speak about revising all the time. When writing essay, I don’t give myself enough time to revise, so I thought it was pointless to revise but this video has help change my mind on the writing process and how each step is still needed to get a good end result.

When reflecting on this course I can say I learned valuable skills that I had never cared about and didn’t see the purpose of using it before. This class has allowed me to understand that writing is best when you are able to make the piece your own through personalizing it. This course has shown me that peer review is very helpful when trying to see if your paper needs work, if I can make changes to the paper to make it clear in certain areas or to see if all of my ideas and thought are understood the way I want my reader to understand it.