I know when writing these learning blogs we aren't
really supposed to comment on the class itself but rather what we've learned.
Quickly, I'd like to say how fortunate I've been in being in this specific
English 101 class. Many of my friends are miserable in their classes because
they feel they have been assigned "busy work" papers. That's my only
comment on the class itself, that it has been very unlike any English class
I've ever taken and I appreciate that.
Since this is a reflection post on the entire
semester I'll go through each unit, saying what my big takeaway was. In the
first unit we focused on giving worthwhile peer reviews. I learned to look at
content over grammatical errors because fixing grammar is poor editing. It's
the message of the paper that matters, not their misuse of commas. In my first
learning blog I was in the midst of writing my Polar Plunge article, and I feel
like that was a long time ago. I have learned so much more since then. For the
second unit we got into groups and worked with various genres. From this I
learned that you can never be too descriptive when writing a research proposal
and design. After some confusion during the peer review session I saw that I needed
to write as if my audience and Nicole had no idea what was going on. I tend to write under the assumption that everyone reading my papers knows whats going on, and that often will not be the case. Now when writing I put myself in the reader's shoes and try to be as descriptive and explanatory as possible. From working with genres so much, I now look around at the various genres that I come into contact with daily and think about it's constraints and how people conform to those rules. I look at how I change the way I speak and write based on those genres I'm communicating within. Unit three
was an awesome project! I felt my most creative writing this paper and got to
explore the way Facebook has changed communication (at least within Facebook
itself). I learned to not be so superficial with my writings. My rough draft of the GRWJ article needed to go beyond the surface of the ways people communicate via Facebook and dig deeper. When revising I talked about how Facebook has changed the ways people talk to one another. For the third unit I also had to write an abstract, which is something I've never done before. It seems easy enough-you just sum up what your paper is about. I found that it is not that easy to find the right words to properly tell potential readers why they should pick your article. After writing my abstract over and over and having others sum up my article, I was able to write a decent abstract.
