Final Reflection

Dominica Beverley

Megan Keaton

ENGL 1103

29 April 2013                                                                                     Final Reflection

            Throughout the course of this semester, my writing skills and abilities have taken a journey that has changed my writing and my identity as a writer.  In the beginning, I was so stuck in the traditional way of writing: introduction, body, and conclusion. In Megan’s English class, she taught me ways and processes through writing assignments that showed me how to get out of that traditional sense of writing. The first part of the journey started with the Writing History Response. The writing history response gave me a basis to figure out where I was strong and weak in my writing. Even in writing the history response I still was stuck in the traditional writing structure that I learned in high school. A way to help with my writing history response was with my Writing Timeline and Schooling Trajectory. There were so many influences to my writing that had an impact on the way I write. I feel like most of the English teachers I encountered impact my writing in some way. They all raised my level of thinking in some way. In elementary school up until high school, I did a lot of free writing during my leisure which did not require any structure. So when I got to school and I had to write during class and I struggled with getting what I had to say from my head to paper all within a certain structure. 

            Some things that gave me more critique and feedback on my writing was the workshops and the comments from my inquiry groups and Megan. Reading these responses gave me insight on what I needed to change or expand on. For my Exploratory Essay Reflection, Annotated Bibliography Reflection, and Joining the Conversation Reflection, I received all types of feedback that really helped me improve those papers so that not only I could write a great paper but so that my way of thinking could change for future papers and essays to come.

Meanwhile, on the journey to find my identity as a writer, I have come across assignments that let my mind wonder and just ask questions. The Exploratory Essay let me write about things I was curious about to include in my inquiry process while displaying the synthesis of themes between the other pieces that we were discussing in class. I noticed that with Step One, I was still stick in the 3-part paper structure from middle and high school. I had an introduction, a big body paragraph and a conclusion. Megan and my group pointed out things that needed to be fixed like actually trying to get the reader to see the different points of view with the readings and articles I was synthesizing in my essay. After incorporating their feedback into my paper, I saw that my writing changed and I was starting to break up my thoughts into more paragraphs instead of one big body paragraph.

Seeing the different stories and watching the different videos in class about education made me wonder about music in education. Especially with the Writing Into the Day entries, I was really interested in the dynamics of school and its purpose in a student’s life. As a student, I know about some of these discrepancies that arise when discussing the topic of school and education. The Research Proposal let Megan and others know what I was going to inquire about. This took my writing to another level. Since the proposal was in the form of a letter, it helped me practice of a different form of writing while still trying to get my point across to my audience. Once I had my inquiry topic in place, I had to actually research the subject. I learned how to use the library’s online catalog system and I found scholarly articles to help me answer or even begin to answer my inquiry process. Once I found these sources, explaining why I needed them or how it was going to help me in my inquiry paper, was when I found out about an Annotated Bibliography. Before this class, I always heard about citing sources and bibliographies but an annotated bibliography really opened my eyes as a writer, especially if you are writing based off of research.

Once I started to inch away from the traditional sense of writing, my analysis started to decrease or needed more work. In my first draft of my Annotated Bibliography, I was summarizing the articles when I was supposed to analyze the text. I had such a hard time but in order to get some type of analysis of the author’s point of view, I had to really think critically about the author was trying to get me to understand while figuring out if what the author is saying makes any sense to me and my inquiry.

Continuing the journey, we did a fun but challenging assignment which was the Joining the Conversation piece. This allowed me to really step into the minds of the sources and the authors and make them talk to each other. This was another form of writing that I was not familiar with, but I just took it as another chance for me to go crazy creative. The second step to the assignment was to turn the dialogue into a paper. I found this exercise to be quite difficult, so I found that using my annotated bibliography gave me the most support when trying to write a paper. I think this was the one assignment where I did incredibly well on the structure and the points that I wanted to make. I tried something different with my writing where I use subheadings not only to break up my paper but to sequence the topics I touched on my paper. After getting comments from Megan and my group, I feel like I just wrote the most detailed paper and informing paper in my school career.