Kevin Stocking English 2010 Professor Lara Asplund Course Reflection

To Whom It May Concern: By taking the English 2010 course I have further learned to fine-tune my writing skills. I have come to appreciate the writing process more as I have written, received feedback, analyzed that feedback, and fixed and written more work to receive feedback again from yet another source. I realize now, more than ever, that writing a well put together piece requires more than just one revision, especially if that single revision only surmounts from my thoughts once I read my own work. I am not the end all source for my revisions. Each essay written in this course and presented in my portfolio was revised at least twice. This achieves the course goals of using the writing process to conceive, draft, and revise individual works as well as working collaboratively with other writers through the process of review and feedback. The process was not always easy, however, because each person reading my writings will perceive them differently. Perhaps the biggest challenge was to interpret their feedback to reflect what they were imagining when reading a piece and then be able to incorporate that to make it read better for all. On the other hand, the aspect of the course I found most enjoyable and later on comprehended well, though I had not ever given much thought to it before, was writing in multiple genres. In no prior writing class had this been emphasized to me and I feel it enlightened my view on writing as a whole. Though I was at first worried about writing on only a single topic for all the

genres, this requirement most solidified my understanding of the differences between the genres. The writings from this course that best illustrate these capacities include my memoir of my own experiences and a report to address a rhetorical opportunity, as these were my strongest individual pieces on the subject of college financial aid from the government. I also wished to include the collaborative public service announcement project in my portfolio to show work completed as a team, which was quite fun. This project was also very informative as we compiled research and collectively, it strongly represents another genre. It is an important skill to work well with others and create something together to include several perspectives, and so I was very pleased that the group I was in could do just that. I will take the lessons I have learned in this course with me into all future writing endeavors as they have encouraged me to appropriately adapt my writing style and genre choice for particular writing situations.