Mid-Term Reflection
How has your understanding of the writing process evolved?
This course is much different from previous English or writing classes I’ve attended in that requires you to consider all modes of communication and really forces you to use them to make your writing more effective. Even last semester in English 1101, while we were taught the different modes of communication, the only thing we were required to do really was write. The absence of full-length essays so far in this class has also allowed me much more freedom with my assignments to do them in different ways to see what is most effective. Primary and secondary research are both very important in composing a persuasive piece but I feel like secondary research requires more work for it to be as taken as seriously as primary research. With secondary research, you have to be very diligent with citing your sources and making sure the audience knows what you’re saying isn’t just assumption but actually rooted in research. I think the way I need to improve in this area is with my secondary research; I believe there have been a couple of times where Mrs. Arrington has pointed out that I used a certain fact without saying where it came from so I definitely need to be better about in-text citations. The main two audiences I’ve been catering my writing to have been Mrs. Arrington and my classmates. While it is something that has been an aspect of this class, I hadn’t very much considered that someone outside of this class would be looking on my blog for information. Despite this, I sill believe that the content on my wordpress site would still be useful in some degree to any researcher not affiliated with this or GSU at all. Another unique thing about this class is that we still have yet to write an essay. This format of using blog posts allows me to be more succinct and focus on individual modes of communication in more detail than essays with minimum word or page counts.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of your work so far?
I feel that one of the main strengths of my writing style is that I am able to go into very minute detail about my surroundings (built environments) and pieces of literature and while that can be very useful in some contexts (mainly the Built environment descriptions) that require absolute objectivity, I find that one of my major shortcomings is being able to apply that observation to a specific rhetorical goal within a given writing assignment. The only extra assignments I have done for this class have been office hour visits which were very helpful because I felt that I really needed someone to show me the ins and outs of the website platform in order for me to use it correctly. The main reason I’ve been neglecting the extra assignments is that I’ve been a bit overwhelmed with other classes, especially since this semester I have a lot of classes outside of English that have out-of-class reading due nearly every class meeting so getting around to all of them has become a bit of a daunting task recently. The primary way I intend to improve my performance is to take quizzes on D2L and post my own independent blog entries on different built environments I experience daily while living on campus.
How are you going to apply what you have learned to future projects and your work in this course?
I plan to change my method of approach in this class to give myself more time to prepare for assignments and read the associated literature so that I give more educated response and bibliographies. I also think that the central problem with my blog posts is the spatial mode. My text gets switched around in an inconvenient way in conjunction with my pictures and the one time I tried to put a video in a post it didn’t embed correctly so it just came up as a link and not a window with a play button. I believe I just need to lay around with the features on wordpress in order to perfect that aspect of my rhetoric