Typically, in the past, writing was more of a black and white area for me. I read a text and responded directly to a question given to me from my instructor, turned in my paper and hopefully received an A. This class has changed my view on academic writing tremendously. From day one, Dr. Wharton, has attempted to show us the ability to read a text and make an understanding based on rhetoric and what the author was trying to convey.

Her methods have quickly adapted my ability to understand the texts versus just reading texts. Which in turn, has quickly evolved my ability to compose better responses. For example, I am now able to pinpoint certain modes within texts; linguistic, visual, aural or etc. I feel that I have noticed these in the past but I never had someone show me how to find them and relate them to built environment and how the author is trying to portray a setting. I think this is a main reason for my evolution of composition. In contrast, I still have some weakness’ that need to be addressed. Which, in my eyes, are completely understandable since we have only been in class for six weeks. This is my ability to stay focused on summarizing texts based on what the author is trying to convey and not my feeling on this. I think this is mainly due to the way I was trained in the past on reading texts and writing an essay based on my thoughts. This route follows the Golden Rule on given the author the proper respect to write a composed responded on rhetoric based on what they wanted the reader to focus on and not what they wanted the reader to make as a judgement.

All in all, this has been an exciting course thus far and has really opened my eyes on the ability to pull certain triggers from texts to better understand the author and people/objects they are addressing in their articles. I believe studying the built environment is something that can be translated into nearly any almost facet of life. It provides you the ability to see past the stigma’s that presented on a daily basis and to dig deeper into understanding, why? I hope to further expand my ability in write reflectively in this course and see the world in a different way than I have in the past.