Anne Berry

Miss. Diaz
English 120
3 May 2015
Student Learning Outcomes Reflection Essay
I really enjoyed being apart of this English 120 class. We did many activities and
different writing styles to achieve growth in our student learning outcomes. We tore an ad
apart in our first main writing assignment (MWA) and found the pathos, logos, and ethos.
Then we got to get even more creative and chose a topic we would write a position paper
on. People chose from a wide variety, and I chose shark finning. Our final MWA we had
to collaborate with two other classmates, and choose a problem around Albuquerque, that
we would write a proposal on and find a possible answer. We also went through a lot of in
class activities that helped us with SLOs including: Citing work, memo work, and fallacy
work.
C. Writing as a process:
Using multiple approaches for planning, researching, prewriting, composing,
assessing, revising, editing, proofreading, collaborating, and incorporating feedback in
order to make your compositions stronger in various mediums and using multiple
technologies.
Always the first thing I think of when I talk about SLO C is the way my planning
changes depending on what Im writing. When I wrote my MWA1 my planning was
mostly surrounded by logos, pathos, and ethos. My outline for my position paper,
however, was more in detail than my normal outlines and more in detail than any other

papers I wrote this semester. My final paper I wrote didnt have a lot of planning at all. I
even left my home base of an outline. I wrote my section of the MWA3 solely off of a list
of things that really had nothing to do with how to write a paper. Another big thing we
did was work in groups. I dont think Ive ever worked in groups so much before this
class. Ive also never shared a paper with a group of people either. This really brought me
out of my comfort zone because I had to match my writing style with someone elses that
normally doesnt write like me. This along with peer reviewing really helped me edit
other peoples papers, and take other peoples edits into consideration. Understanding
student-learning outcome C really helped me continue to grow as a writer.

A. Rhetorical Situation and Genre:

Analyze, compose, and reflect on arguments in a variety of genres, considering
the strategies, claims, evidence, and various mediums and technologies that are
appropriate to the rhetorical situation.
The best example I can think of for explaining how I used SLO A is the way I
changed my LSAs into my MWAs. They all started with smaller papers, and then were
morphed into larger papers. This is by making them more in depth, and adding more
points. An example of this is our MWA3 starting as a memo and becoming a proposal. An
opposite example of changing this is my MWA2 becoming a poster. It condensed the
knowledge, and all I did was change the genre. Writing our papers around the audience is
another way we change the rhetorical situation. A paper explaining pollution to
preschoolers would not be the same situation as explaining the same problem to adults.
The papers would be two completely different papers.

F. Reflection:
Evaluates your development as a writer over the course of the semester and
describes how composing in multiple genres and mediums using various technologies
can be applied in other contexts to advance your goals.
When I look back at the beginning of the semester, its so weird to think about
how much my writing has changed. Going through the class I felt like my writing wasnt
changing at all. All of the little things we had done in class acted like a butterfly effect for
my writing. Even the small lesson we did on fallacies made me more aware of the way I
make arguments in my papers. All of the lessons I feel like made my knowledge a lot
cleaner, and not with the added gunk. I finally dropped some bad habits in my writing
that I had been caring with me since I began writing. I finally learned to read my paper
after I finished it before I hit send. I realized that it wouldnt cause me any extra work
than maybe hitting backspace a few times or correcting my spelling. I also changed my
word usage so it wasnt as awkward as previous papers. This is still a work in progress,
but Ive noticed a huge improvement, and I think thats what counts.

G. Research:
Use writing and research as a means of discovery to examine your personal
beliefs in the context of multiple perspectives and to explore focused research questions
through various mediums and technologies.
I had not actually known how to find proper sources until this year. Id always
rely on Google. My high school English teacher explained it to us, but we didnt have

search engines that would actually help us. My research has improved a 100%. I also
tried to make it a point to fully read the articles I was looking at instead of just hunting
for quotes. This caused me to take the writers opinions into my brain, and really sort
through them and think about how I could incorporate that into my writing. Along with
learning how to find research for my papers I also refreshed myself on how to properly
site information. Shark meat has large traces of methyl mercury, and this is very
dangerous for humans to have in their bodies (Culley 45). This is a properly cited
sentence out of a magazine article on shark finning. In an activity in class we brushed up
on citing, and learned how to paraphrase and summarize articles that we want to use in
our research papers, or more specifically our MWA2. I had actually no idea that you were
supposed to cite paraphrases and summaries of articles we found. So, Im extremely
thankful I learned this way instead of failing a paper, or even worse a class!
Thanks to this English class, I was able to continue my knowledge in writing
through the student learning outcomes. I was incredibly lucky to have an instructor that
made it as painless as possible. I chose to go into detail with SLO G and SLO C along
with the required SLO A and SLO F. These went into research, writing styles, rhetorical
situations, and reflection. I think these were the most important, and easiest to write
about. After this class I will never have to enroll in an English course again, but I will be
able to take the knowledge I learned in this class and write super fabulous papers for
future courses.