Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Self Reflective- Developed Significantly as a Writer

English 1020 is the first English course that I’ve taken in my first semester of college. Through this course I’ve been taught how to create a blog and post my writings. I’ve always thought of English to be writing papers and turning it into the actual hands of my teacher, but in this course I was taught to use online methods to create a writing and turn it in via internet, something that I am not use to. I feel that doing writing and reading through the Internet can make your work stronger. Through this English course I have developed strongly as a writer.
In other English classes that I have taken I was always use to getting a topic and writing about it, whereas this class gave you a subject that’s broad and gives you the chance to reflect your own into it. The three main papers that were assigned to the class was Observational, Reflective and Rhetoric essay. Our weekly assignments also included topics that the teacher chose and free writes. In the observational essay I got to choose what I wanted to observe and write about. I also got to reflect on things I wanted to reflect on with the reflective essay, and I got to choose a piece of rhetoric that I wanted to analyze.
During this period, the free writes gave me a lot of time to open up to many new ideas and fun and exciting things to write about. I never usually write on what’s going on in the world, and I finally did. On one of my free writes I wrote about the weather. I wrote, “I ran into plenty of pot holes and had to be washed many of times to clean off all the chemicals CDOT pours down on the roads to melt the ice”. In this class I learned to incorporate hyperlinks into my text so the reader can have a deeper understanding about what it is that I am talking about. In another piece of writing I wrote I used a hyperlink that backed up statistics that I incorporated in my writing, “The Statistics on Drinking and Driving among Teens says that eight teens die a day due to drunk driving.” I’ve learned that using facts and statistics can make your piece of writing stronger.
Using hyperlinks and statistics were a main part of my posts, but I’ve also learned to summarize and give background information on the subject I’m writing about. In one of my last post, the rhetoric essay I summarized a Bud Weiser commercial clip to give the reader an understanding of the You Tube clip I posted. I wrote, “The instructor tries to get one of the divers to gather enough courage to jump out of the plane, but when that doesn’t work, he tries to entice him by throwing a six-pack of Bud light out the door saying, "Not even for some Bud Light?". Instead of going for the bait the diver sits back and watches the pilot, who doesn’t have a parachute or anything to help him reach the ground safely, instinctively fly out of the plane after the cool and refreshing beverage.” In this summary I used actual dialogue to explain what was going on. I even boosted up my word choice by using “cool and refreshing beverage”.
Using clips and pictures in my writing was a big advantage of writing things online. I think that it gives the reader a clue about that you’re talking about and it’s a lot more interesting. All, if not most of my post have an image or clip incorporated in it. These images also give the audience an idea about the titles that the post were given. I’ve never had to write so many titles in an English class and this class has developed my ability to write interesting titles. Some of these titles include: Half Undressed, Dinner and a Hitch Hiker, What if that Stranger Hit and Killed Me, Turning Into an Obsession, etc.
These weekly assignments and papers that I was given to write has developed me as a writer in many ways. I learned how to be more computer friendly, using the internet to incorporate hyperlinks, clips, and images. Using statistics in my paper made my writing stronger and the titles that I thought of gave the audience and interest to read my posts. To make the audience not bored of what I wrote, I developed further skills of using new ideas and improving my word choice. This English class has shown me that English is not all about writing about specific topics that are given to you, but you can write about many different things and incorporate numerous effects to make your piece of writing more powerful. Through all that I learned in English 1020, I have developed significantly as a writer.

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