At the beginning of the semester I hated writing. In fact English was the bane of my existence. When I entered this English course I thought it would be a miracle if I passed the class. The thought of writing page after page of papers made me feel a bit little nervous. Even with that in mind, I told myself to try and put some effort into this class and try to grow as a writer. I asked myself what can this course do for me? Can it teach me anything new or be of something useful? Over the course of the semester I came to realize and appreciate the knowledge that I was receiving in this course.
When Unit One was started, I was really curious to be using the blogger website to post our assignments. I don’t know what about blogging that made it so appealing to me. It was a new medium for my writing. When we had to post the 500 + word entries to our blog I was a little hesitant. In the beginning 500 words seemed a lot of writing to me. I could follow the prompt and answer the questions. But usually I would be short of the required 500 minimum post. A lot of times I had writers block. I couldn’t think what was I going to say next? Will it be enough to reach that 500 quota? The thing was I didn’t have a good flow. I didn’t get lost in my thoughts and just write whatever was on my mind. When we did things like a free writing in class that made me a better writer and thinker. This is important because I it becomes easier to expand my thoughts and reach those word quotas.
As a writer I’m use to writing for my instructors, for their eyes only. On the blogger website my writing was available to all of my group members & the whole class as well as my instructor too. This openness made me more aware of my audience. What I write will be read by people I may or not know. This made me self-aware what I do and how I do it. As the semester progressed from Unit One to Unit Two that self-awareness feeling became more and more noticeable. In Unit One we had the extended bib’s and the group responses. While in Unit Two we had to build a website. The scope of my work changed from individual posts to an entire website. I had a bigger part, which meant I had a bigger audience that I could potentially reach. Not only that but when did group commentary and workshops I feel more confident in my writing and became a better learner. The group teamwork helped molded my writing and thinking processes. When group responses were due during Unit 1 I became more aware of my thoughts and how I’m writing. The comments that my group members left and when I commented on theirs made me reflect upon on how I writing and how I should approach things. What they said about my writing gave me a direction of where to go next. With my revision process I started it off by asking my group members and my roommates to look at it and give me feedback. I also had to reread my website because it had been a while since I turned it in. When I got the feedback about website from my group members I compared to the feedback that I received for my Unit Two Grade. They talked about similar stuff that was recommended that I should fix such as fixing the bullet points on some sections. But they also talked about different stuff than my Unit Two feedback. Things like bolding certain questions like on my Home Page. Or aligning and moving around certain paragraphs to look better was because of their feedback, an example of this would be the About Head Start page. I also deleted, rephrased, or added sentences too. When I reread my website, I saw that certain sentences didn’t flow right with the rest of the paragraphs. Sometimes the sentence itself wasn’t needed, it was fluff, so I just deleted it. Sometimes I added more information because my Unit Two feedback suggested it or I felt it would help improve my website. When I was expanding the About Head Start page, I reused one of my sources that was only cited on the main page. So instead of researching for new sources I just reused the source that I already had. This research strategy was extremely useful because it saved me time. In the beginning it took hours and hours to find a good source. From there if you wanted to use another secondary source as back up you would needed to spend more time just to find another good source that you could use. Now, with my draft already done if I really needed to use another source I could use lateral research to back up my claims.
In this English 102 course I feel more comfortable as a writer. Next time when I’m writing in my future courses and I have a report, response, or a paper due. I’m going to think about what I learned in my English 102 course. There’s lots of things to consider. Like what do I want to add to the conversation? Where do my ideas diverge from the author? Does this piece of writing make me ask questions? Is so and so creditable? What’s the technical jargon associated with this field? What’s the controversy or conflict in this area? I’m going to be inquiring, researching, and using multimedia to enhance my writing. Whatever I do, I’ll be sure using what I learned from this course.
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