Final Project

August 12, 2015

Dear Professor Bottai and Classmates:

I've taken some pretty good English/composition classes in my life so I definitely already understood a lot of the ideas about writing that were emphasized in this course. However, I think this course had a much bigger focus on the technical components of writing as well as rhetorical analysis, neither of which I've really ever focused on in great detail.

During this course, I've learned more about paying attention to the details of writing, which weren't necessarily a big concern for me before. I think that's twofold because I learned about technical details but also about paying attention to the genre and my audience and what I want them to get out of my writing. Most of this learning happened in my blog posts like Analyzing My Audience and QRGs: The Genre. As a reader, I think I'm more conscious of the writer's intentions when I'm reading other people's works. That's really interesting because it feels almost like I'm double conscious; I'm reading the work and getting something from it, but I'm also cognizant of what I'm supposed to get from it and I'm actively assessing that as I'm reading it.

Being aware of these things as a reader has definitely helped me to be more conscious as a writer. For instance, in Questions About Controversy preparing for Project 3, I really started to understand the process of choosing a topic. Brainstorming 25 question was easy because I just started spouting things off to myself about the gender gap and what I might want to know. But then in the blog post Narrowing My Focus, it was a tough process trying to boil that 25 question list down to just 3 things but doing so helped me see how laser focused writing really is. I mean out of all of those 25 questions, I picked three and that was enough to keep me researching and writing for hours. The good part about it was that when it came time to craft a thesis statement, I knew which questions I was answering and so it was easy for me to take those questions and come up with a thesis statement about them.

Another thing that really allowed me to grow during this course was the peer review process. I think the peer review process for this class was difficult for me because it wasn't face to face. It's hard to convey my ideas about a piece by writing about it, and similarly, it's a little harder to understand what people are trying to do with their writing when they're not there to read it to me. I think that second point might have been a good thing though because it made it easier for me to identify parts of people's pieces where the language was unclear and where they could have tweaked a couple things to make it easier to understand. I never really recognized that peer reviews did anything for me until I had to write blog posts reflecting on my drafts and how the peer reviews had helped.

Outside of this course, I actually talked to a lot of my friends about the gender gap and what it means while researching and writing Project 3, which was really cool because it showed me that my writing doesn't have to stay on the page. If I can write about real things that actually matter, then writing becomes a vehicle that helps me reach new levels of understanding. This was doubly helpful because they often gave me unofficial peer reviews and suggested things that I could do better to improve my writing, which was super helpful during revisions.

I don’t always like revising my writing, and I was forced to approach the revision process for each essay. But once I started, I realized I was actually getting a lot of value out of it. The revision questions that I had to answer for blog posts reflecting on my drafts for Project #1, Project #2 and Project #3, really made me stop and think about what I was doing in my writing and whether or not it was what I wanted to be doing. Questions like "what was the purpose and audience or your original paper? how did it achieve that purpose or reach that audience?" were really new to me and I think that considering these things after I had finished a draft really helped me identify what changes I needed to make to improve my writing based on factors like audience and genre.

I definitely never gave thought to the fact that reading and writing in different genres are completely unique things. It really surprised me how much changes when genre changes: audience, tone, purpose, language and even format. After having gone through this course I think I'm much better equipped to assess what genre I'm working within and then read/write accordingly.

But even though I’m better equipped to be a good writer, I still have to work on getting my pieces done in a timely matter. I think that if I were to take another composition course, I would try to write my pieces sooner. Instead of waiting until the deadline was approaching to start getting things down on paper, I think it would make more sense and make me more successful to start early and get all of my ideas down into a piece of writing and then from there I could tweak it and alter it until it was really quality college writing.

College writing fits into my life now because I'm in college and college students have to write a lot of things. Later, I think writing will play a pretty big role in my life because I'll have to communicate my ideas to a lot of people and it can't all be face to face. Especially in being a business major, language is really crucial to the things I'll be involved in and effective writing will help me to express my ideas clearly to my associates. In order to get really good at this, I need to remember to pay attention to the details.

I learned to pay more attention to the details through reading about them in this course. Much of this knowledge came from the Clarity #1, Clarity #2, Punctuation #1, and Punctuation #2 assignments, where I had to read chapters from Rules For Writers and reflect on the way I could take the technical things I had just read about and apply them to my writing. It really opened my eyes to all of the little nuanced things that can be done to make a really good piece. I had always thought that some people were just naturally awesome writers and others weren't.. and that still might be true, but now I know there's a guide for those of us who aren't as naturally talented.

I don’t know if I’m exactly talented, but I’m sure that my writing is better when I put more time into it. Going through this course really reminded me that I do procrastinate a lot, which isn't necessarily a great thing at all, but it's true and I've started to find some good ways to work with (although the best way is to just do things earlier). Even more than that, my experiences in this course showed me that writing can be improved, just like anything else, with some time and some focus. I think when my work doesn’t meet standards, it’s because I rushed through it and didn't take the time to reflect on the experience or the process that I went through. This happens from time to time and I've come to accept it, but I know that I should really work on allotting sufficient time for myself so that I can really produce some good work.

Having completed this course, I definitely am better equipped to analyze texts through close reading and critical thinking while considering their purposes, audiences, and contexts. I can write essays that develop analyses with evidence drawn from texts I've read, although I think I still have a lot of room for improvement in that section. I've definitely learned to research, read, write, and revise writing in a variety of different areas, which will be helpful as I go on to work in courses outside of first-year composition. I don't think I've really mastered the conventions of scholarly research. Scholarly research to me just seems really overly formal and it doesn't always yield pertinent information. For instance, all of the scholarly articles I found about the gender gap were from over 40 years ago, so those could only help me so much when I'm writing about the gender gap in 2015. But finally, I'm definitely able to create multiple, meaningful revisions of writing, and I think that's really what matters. As long as I can take something I've written and find ways to make it better, I think I'll be alright.

Sincerely,

Tripp Twyman