The academic writing process in this class is slightly different from my past experiences with English courses. This class focuses a lot on secondary research, which has broadened my knowledge of the writing process. I have learned that the more time you put into the research behind a piece of writing the easier it is to compose it and get your point across to the audience. I plan to dig deeper with my research and annotations for the rest of the assignments this semester. For reading summaries 3 and 4 I annotated the entire article and did some background research before starting my essay and found that this really improved the quality of my piece. I think that the writing I am doing in this class has an audience of mostly my classmates, but because this is a blog, anyone can read it. My built environment descriptions may act as reviews for certain areas in Atlanta. For people interested in visiting the area I reported on, the descriptions will help them get a better of idea of that space.
As far as strengths and weaknesses go I have discovered new ones as a writer during the time I have been in this course. I tend to excel when it comes to wording and organization of pieces. However, I often forget to incorporate other forms of media such as video, maps, sounds, and photos in my work. I am so used to writing essays where the only thing on the page are words that I find it sort of taboo to add in a video or sound clip in the middle of a written piece. Because I am writing on a blog in this class, multimodality has become standard when I post my work. Overall, I think incorporating these different types of media has made my writing more interesting to readers, as well as to myself. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. This class has showed me that composing a piece is about so much more than just words.
Some of the extra points activities I have completed are quizzes and creating a Facebook group with some of my fellow peers. Both of these have helped me to better understand the course. The Facebook group serves as a great way for us to discuss topics and also ask questions when we need to. The quizzes have been most helpful because they review topics that are very relevant to this course and writing in general. I am fairly satisfied with the effort I have put in so far, but I could definitely participate more in class. I plan on trying to use one of my pieces for an in-class peer review workshop so I can get as much feedback as possible.
My approach to the last two reading summaries have definitely changed since the start of this course. I have become more open-minded on what to incorporate in my summary. I have also become way less opinionated when writing these summaries; I have learned to summarize the author’s opinion instead of incorporating my own. As for the extra points activities, I plan to work more with Writer’s 2.0 and comment on more of my peers’ blog posts! I think these activities will help to better my knowledge as a writer and help me learn how to analyze other’s writing which in turn will help me with my own.