English 015 was a course to remember.

This course impacted me in so many

ways not only in English but for college as a whole. I learned so many new things

about writing I never even heard of before. Looking back to all of the lessons we

did I would have to say they all served a really good purpose. I honestly didn’t

like reading all those assigned readings but it ended up benefiting me for the

future assignments.

WP1 taught me a lot about Genre. Genre is a topic that is really broad so

nobody really understands it. Learning about genre I learned a lot about

conventions. Conventions could be mostly described as what makes something

that something. Everything we look at is that thing for a reason. For example a

obituary is a obituary because it has death dates, beloved family, loved by, about

the person's life overall, sometimes the death and funeral dates. I also learned a

lot about audience and the purpose of writing a certain piece. Learning this

taught me what’s important to write in a paper and what’s not that important to

leave out.

WP2 I would have to say was my favorite. This assignment let me explore

something that I’m truly interested in and passionate about. Within this

assignment I was able to learn a lot about my future career in criminal justice and

how I could look further into substance abuse. Making this into a PowerPoint

presentation showed me not only how to research something but how to

effectively present a project and an elevator pitch. This made me more

comfortable overall with presenting projects in front of a bunch of people I don’t

fully know. I was able to take my feedback and put it to use by making myself/

assignments better for the future.

WP3 was also a very interesting assignment. This assignment was writing an

outreach email to a professor to ask about starting an ACURA project. The other

part of this assignment was an annotated bibliography something I never even

heard of before. The annotated bibliography is something that I’m going to now

be able to use throughout college. This taught me how to summarize things I

read to help make my paper and sources easier to figure out. Annotated

bibliography also shows the readers you know your facts and you did your

research.

My approach to writing evolved from this course by getting a better

understanding of grammar and genre overall. This course taught me how to write

papers targeting certain audiences and how to properly use punctuation. My

Thinking evolved because I got to think about every assignment before I did it,

and with feedback from classmates I got to see and think why exactly did I put

this here or what should I actually do with this information. My research really

evolved especially within the WP2 looking up everything about my outreach

project and how I could improve it/ what’s going on within my topic. Overall this

course changed my opinion on writing.

This course helped me change my stance towards writing as a whole. Before I

even entered this class I hated writing and English all together. Writing wasn’t
really a strong suit of mine because I struggle with grammar and punctuation a

lot. When I entered the course and learned about genre as a whole and

everything within the WP assignments I can say I feel more confident about

writing assignments. Zack my professor helped me a lot through this course

when I didn’t understand something, which made it stress free so I was able to

help me relax and focus on the assignment. With that said I would say I actually

think writing is ok and I don’t hate it as much.

During our feedback workshops I can say I had a lot of ah ha moments. One of

the ah ha moments I can recall is when we had to read the essays out loud and I

accidentally had the, “the” in the sentence. Another ah ha moment I had was not

capitalizing someone’s name in my essay. My final ah ha moment was when I

tried to guess what an elevator pitch was and I thought it was an actually elevator

thing.

After all these things I would have to say some of the course concepts were

tricky. When we started off with genre and doing WP1 I found that pretty tricky

because I fully didn’t understand what we had to do. I chose to do softball

homepages and found that it was pretty tricky to explain because there’s not a lot

of sources to look at to explain my argument. I also didn’t think I had enough time

for the overall WP1. Another thing I found pretty tricky was the annotated

bibliography. This was pretty tricky to me because I didn’t understand what

exactly had to be shown with each source. Also, I didn’t really understand how to
cite my sources. I wasn’t sure If it would be APA or MLA format, and when I

figured it out I wasn’t exactly sure how to make it either one of them.

After further talk about these things I learned more about them which makes it

a little more easier to understand now. One trick I learned for citing things is to

look at the source and see what format they have their sources in and see how

they set it up. This trick makes it easier to cite your source the right way. Another

trick I learned was read your assignment out loud. This might seem strange but it

really helps you catch grammatical errors that you might miss while writing the

assignment. Therefore another trick I learned was to outline my essays before I

write them. Outlining your work helps you visualize everything and see if it makes

since or not. Not only does it help you visualize everything it helps you see if your

facts support your topic/ thesis or not. Finally another trick I learned was peer

editing, this doesn’t really count as a full trick but it’s something that is very

useful. Peer editing let’s other people help you with your paper and give you

feedback that can benefit your work. I wasn’t really a big fan of peer editing but

doing it during this course made me realize it really helps. I got feedback that

helped me improve my writing and my whole ACURA project so it’s something I

will totally recommend.

All the things I learned in this course go back to the “rhetoric”. Rhetoric

means “the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the use

of figures of speech and other compositional techniques” (dictionary). This is

basically targeting audience, tone and any figure of speech you think of. Through
this I learned that there is a different tone writers can write in some can be

persuasive, informative, or effective. When I wrote my WPs I can say I used all

these tones because the PowerPoint was informative/persuasive , WP1 was

informative and WP3 was effective.

This course can be used in the future because it teaches the basics of English.

I learned the basics of grammar and genre as a whole. I’ll be taking the skills I

learned and using them whenever I have a paper due for the rest of my life.

When I need to cite my sources I now know how to write a annotated

bibliography so I can do my sources a lot easier in the future. Finally, this class is

a really good class to take freshman year because you can learn a lot of basics

about writing.