Final Reflection

Kathleen Rollings Professor Nall ENGL 1312 W70 12-11-2023 Final Reflection For this final reflection, I will be covering several different subjects, including the assignments I worked on in this class, what I’ve learned and can take away, some of my strengths and weaknesses, and overall, how this class affected me academically, professionally, and personally. I start first with my assignments. Assignment 1. Academic Success Proposal. For this assignment, I was given the challenge to write about something that hinders me in my academic life. The class covered several writings about how the fear of failure can overwhelm freshmen, this was familiar to me because I was one of those freshmen who was scared in a brand-new environment not knowing what I was about to face. In researching for this assignment, I learned something about myself. I learned how my inability to deny requests from others often made it hard for me to set time to study, and how that ends up affecting me because it leads to procrastination and rushing projects last minute. In the peer review, we did I read several classmates’ papers and they covered a similar topic to mine, which made me feel not so alone. It was then I realized that this assignment was to help us bridge the gap in sharing our work with others. I ended up writing a revision for this assignment after receiving feedback from my peers and my instructor, which gave me a better understanding of MLA formatting and how I needed to write my future papers. Assignment 2. Book Jacket Cover. For this assignment, I was challenged to write a book jacket cover for a short story of our choice. I ended up choosing a story that I thought I had never read before but soon ended up realizing it was one I had heard as a child, and lost for a long time (I had been searching for it for a while but didn’t know the name.) This made me excited for this project. I was able to explore my creative side in creating this because we had to summarize it without giving away the story and find artwork that made sense for the story. When it came down to actually writing it, I would write a bit and then start over because it just never seemed right. Once I finally was able to put all of the emotions the story gave me into a summary it was very easy to write. This project also had a certain amount of analysis to it, in finding proper sources for the story I was writing about. Which gave me a deeper insight into the author and the story which I am grateful for. Assignment 3. Annotated Bibliography. This was the hardest and easiest assignment yet. When I first read what all it in detailed, it seemed very overwhelming to me. I had never written something like this before and had never done the type of research it required. Once I started working on it though it felt like a fall into wonderland. I became very excited to continue the research about the story and author I had chosen. It opened my eyes to new academic resources that I didn’t know were available. I did not write a revision for this paper, but the amount of times I edited pieces of it; or changed one of my references was quite a bit. I feel as though in the end that is what gave me a paper, I was happy to submit though. How I feel I best learned rhetorical knowledge was probably through putting myself in the situation of writing for different audiences. Every assignment we wrote was facing a different type of crowd. I feel like the one that was most rhetorical for me in the sense that ‘I don’t ever see it happening’ would be from the 3rd assignment where someone would be using something I wrote to help further their research. For the critical thinking in the aspect of reading and writing. I would say assignment number 2 helped me with the greatest example of this. Reading a short story, understanding it enough to be able to summarize it without giving it all away, and researching the author. I feel as though I was able to learn and show that effectively in this class. Incorporating others’ ideas with my own. I like to think of this one in two different ways. The simplest one being just using references for each of these projects, and showing what others have said about it. The second form I feel is more of a collaborative thought process, in which I had directly quoted from the main work I was writing about, some commentary about it, or an idea that had been brought to my attention by a peer. Developing different strategies for me was a challenge. Once I find something that works I like to stick to it and repeat it, but all 3 of this class’s major writing assignments challenged me in a different way. Assignment 1 challenged how I am as an individual academically and how I needed to understand the way to write and not just put down words. Assignment 3 I had to take a much more analytical approach rather than creative which is what I had used for the other two assignments. For assignment 3 I had to write specifically what something was and why it was useful. For collaboration, this is best shown in this class through the peer reviews. Talking with my peers and getting feedback on my work helped me greatly improve it for the next time which showed in my grades as I started making fewer mistakes and giving feedback, challenging myself to think about something I could not see the flaws in, and finding something to help this person on their writing journey. For knowledge of proper English itself. I feel as though my first draft of assignment 1 versus my revision, versus my final project truly shows that I have gotten a better understanding of how to grammatically format things so that readers understand what I am saying without question. My greatest strength in the class would have to be just my love for writing. Ever since I was little once I was set on writing something the words just seemed to flow but I never learned to fully refine my writings. With my love for reading, and writing, the creativity it allows and the understanding I have now I feel much more confident with my writings. One of my weaknesses in this class would have to be focus. Unless my brain is in a mode of ‘I am ready to sit down and focus’ it is extremely hard for me to get started on a project. Once I start on the assignment, I realize it wasn’t so bad, but just the concentration that it takes to write fluidly it seems is very hard for me to do easily. When I started this semester I was not excited for this class at all. Although I have loved reading and writing my whole life it has never been a strong suit of mine, but how this course is broken down by Professor Nall just makes sense in my mind. I was able to learn and understand things that I hadn’t grasped for gears. I learned how to properly write MLA, how to do book jackets, and annotated bibliographies, as well as the projects that we did to understand tense and sentence structures. I feel as though because of this class I can be confident with my writings now.