Final Course Reflection

Dear Professor Gregory:

Throughout our time here, we have asked ourselves many times what it means to be a good writer and what ways we can improve. When I entered the class at first I had the impression that it would resemble a high school class and we would follow certain guidelines, this was not the case. We had more freedom to choose the structure and content of our writing, and this helped me realize my weaknesses and strengths as a writer. I realized I was strong in making connections between sources and support my thoughts with them. My weakness was that I kept struggling because I did not have a foundation or specific guidelines to follow.

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In Unit 1, we focused on text synthesis and basic rhetorical context associated with them. We did the Unit project where we read, analyzed and wrote about a certain author including things like appeals, summary, angle of vision, reading with and against the grain, and others. We did this in a group and posted it in chunks in one of our group members' portfolio. This project was a good start for us because I believed it laid the basic foundation of writing and how to do it efficiently.

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We then progressed unto Unit 2, where we had to write our blog posts. That introduced writing that had to do with dialogue between different writers and their ideas. We had to do this in order to also bring our views into while analyzing rhetorical context from the Unit before. I was strong in making the connections but since the project did not really have many deadlines so I struggled with the structure and the formation of it.

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Lastly, we had Unit 3, where our voice was more valued since we had to evaluate the "Theory of Writing". This was a good final part because it served as a reflection in the way that we expressed what we felt when we read all those sources and what the authors had to say about writing. It was about our own theories and experiences mixed with theirs so it was more credible as a paper. I thought of many topics to do for it but I close the one that I could talk more about which was the role of creativity in writing and the way schools structure class to be academic instead of artistic. I also struggled with this assignment because of "lack" of rules but it did help me with ideas more because I got to do it the way I wanted, it just took more time.

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This class was very eye-opening for me in the sense that I learned how college writing differed from high school writing. While there are many forms, there is definitely more freedom.