Over the course of this class, I felt like I did learn some important things that improved my writing. At times, I thought it was challenging and I often scrapped an idea for a paper because I absolutely hated the work that I was doing. I often hear the phrase "you're your biggest critique" and I knew the phrase was true, but this class just reinforced that idea to a great extent.
I'm just going to rip it off like a band-aid and come clean at the beginning of this post, I still cannot stand summary writing. All of the papers that I have written in this class that have had something to do with summary writing made me want to rip my hair out because I felt like it was super repetitive and I felt like I couldn't put my own voice into the writing. I am a very opinionated individual and not being able to speak that opinion irritated me in the largest way possible. Summary writing has helped me grow as a person, though, especially with the summary and rhetorical analysis paper. I had written one
I liked the multimodal project and informative and surprising essay because I was able to pick the topics that I wrote about. I also really enjoyed the documentary summary paper due to the fact that we got to choose what movie we watched, but I do believe that the list of movies needs to be updated for classes in the future. There are several newer documentaries that I believe a lot of people would want to see because of their interesting topics.
In my own opinion, the best thing that helped shape my learning was looking at other student's work. The essay that was provided as an example for the informative and surprising essay was very beneficial to look at and see how others compose their essays. I often receive feedback saying that my paragraphs are too long in my papers, but the sample essay has long paragraphs and it flows well.
The week of the multimodal project, I was sick and wasn't in class all week. In order to find different thoughts and ideas on projects similar to ours, I found different websites, including the Kettering College Writing Center, that gave me more input as to what a multimodal project even was. Even though I was unable to get feedback in class and I didn't get any help on the project, I was extremely excited with the final product. This project can be found at the top of the page under "Technology and Kids."
Although I do not like summary writing, I really enjoyed writing a summary on and watching the movie After Innocence. I felt that this was one of my best papers in this class and was extremely happy with how my paper turned out at the end. This paper can be found at the top of the page under After Innocence.
I'm happy, yet sad to be done with this class. Over the past few years I've realized how much I love writing and not being in any writing focused classes is going to be a change for me. I'm looking forward to my years in college to come and I hope I can apply the tools I learned in this class to other things in my life.
