The following is my short essay midterm for Dr. Harker’s ENGL 3100 course titled Composition Studies: History, Theory, and Practice.  I took it in conjunction with ENGL 3090 during the spring of 2015.  It was a very transformative semester for me as a writer as I began to play with style and organization.  Dr. Harker encouraged us to allow personal narrative to appear naturally within our work and to put aside our fears of being “incorrect” grammatically.  Instead, he urged us to take risks through experimentation.

The purpose of this assignment was to use readings from The Norton Book of Composition Studies to respond to the prompts that he provided.  Naturally, he was one of the audience members, but we were also to write in such a manner that anyone could understand and relate to our work regardless of whether they had read the essays and articles that we referenced.   Because of this setting, we were not required to do a Works Cited page.  One of my favorite things about this artifact is how the answer to the first question gets unashamedly personal even within academic writing.  I can also see a confident exploration of different sentence structures as my own voice as a writer emerges onto the page for the first time.  In thinking about how I would change the work now, I might not add as many quotations to the latter questions and would clean up some awkward transitions, but because of the change it signifies, I would not alter much.