At the beginning of this semester of English 110, I didn’t like it. I had already taken English and writing classes and having to take another one seemed boring. While I know that my writing does need work and I do mix up some of the rhetorical devices since English is my first language, this class still seemed to drag on. However, I learned that I needed to get back to the basics and relearn these basic tools that I have taken for granted all of these years. During this semester, we wrote a personal narrative, an exploratory essay, a critical analysis research essay, and a plethora of different activities that were curated by the students and professor Rogal every week which helped me grow as a writer. Looking through the course objectives, I was able to get a better understanding of how to strengthen my writing skills. These objectives of this course, which were utilized fully through the semester included reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing.
Throughout the semester, we read a lot of pieces of writing. Each piece that we were assigned was to explain and show us different rhetorical devices from the type of genres and who the author is trying to reach with their writing. Each week we were assigned readings that pushed us to analyze and understand the different literary devices and show the students how to incorporate their writing. For example, I wrote my narrative about my experiences with a parent who was in prison and how that affected my life. The audience for that piece was for people who have or had a parent in prison and or people that have carried the burden of parent’s mistake on their back. I wanted to share this story in a creative manner but give my timeline of events of acceptance in chronological order. While I thought that discussing the events in chronological order would show how I was able to overcome the issues, Professor Rogal stated:
This showed me that I need to work on the more creative side of writing. One thing that I found myself being worried about taking this course is forgetting the creative aspect of writing. While this sounds dumb, I haven’t taken a creative writing class in 4 years.
When we were assigned the exploratory essay, which was the introduction to writing more formal research papers, excited me. This is where I feel that I thrive in my writing. While brainstorming ideas (see other works tab), I was able to come up with multiple ideas that interested me. This paper utilized drafting multiple drafts and workshopping with my fellow students. This peer-reviewing step took the editing of my paper to a new level and gave me a better understanding of how my potential audience would interpret my essay topic, which was climate change. I learned from my peers that I needed to frame my argument in a clearer manner and tweak my argument to make it more debatable. Once I handed in my paper, Professor Rogal said that:
I took these notes down for my future papers. One thing that was great to have after this paper was my own grammar mini-lesson on incomplete sentences. We had to create mini-lessons for our class and that helped me with my future papers.
The next big paper that we were worked on was our critical research essay. This paper could be geared towards the topic we had for our exploratory essay or come up with a new topic. I personally picked a new topic that I had more interest in. When we went into the more academic research, we workshopped in the library. While I have used the resources that our library has to offer, I got a better understanding of finding relevant resources and quotes for my paper. From this workshop, we had to choose quotes and references that would be pertinent to our topics, which mine was talking about if mandatory minimum sentencing laws, and if they are right. Professor stated after I submitted my paper that:
While I’m glad that my research paper was clear, which was an evolution of my exploratory essay. One thing that I do have to take into account is my audience could potentially not understand some of the information explained. While this is something that I do need to be aware of, when I did my workshop with my classmates, they understood what I was discussing. I will definingly take that into account for my audience in my academic future.
From this class, I was able to practice and utilize the resources provided in this class. The course’s objectives, which include reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing have been clearly stated throughout the assignments that have been given to us. I understand these course objective’s but I feel that once this semester went virtual, I began to become lazy in working on reading assignments as well as editing my assignments that were given.
