English 11011 was a new experience for me. It’s a class that I relate my entire college experience to. After all, it was the first class that I got up to go to on my first official day of college. It was a writing class like none I have ever taken before and it definitely, as I’ve stated before in previous papers, was anything but conventional – for me at least.
With any class you have things you’d hope to accomplish when all is said and done. For English 11011, Miss Oliver had six specific goals in mind. The first goal was ‘to learn how to recognize and strategically use the conventions of academic literacy.’ Wow, that’s a pretty complex goal it would seem – not really. Basically, it just states that we needed to be able to recognize the different ways in which to structure your writing in both linguistic and logistical ways.
Attacking this goal from a personal standpoint I believe that I did accomplish this first goal. A specific assignment in which I exemplified this was the Multi-Genre Research Paper. A big selling point of the assignment is the order that you put your specific genres and this assignment really showed me that not only is the piece of work important, but the way in which you order it is REALLY important. A poorly ordered MGRP would’ve spelled disaster for what I was trying to convey.
The second goal was ‘to understand and use rhetorical principles to produce public and private documents appropriate for academic and professional audiences and purposes.’ Or simply stated, to understand who you are writing to and then with that known be able to write to focus onto the needs of your audience.
In the Photo Essay I really understood and grasped this concept. I know it’s seems cliché, but when you are doing a video about ‘Northern Ohio Sports Fans’ you better know the ways to connect to them. As a sports fan myself, I know exactly what that kind of reader would want. They want flashy pictures of ballplayers and shots of your team in its moment of triumph. Did I accomplish the second goal in this assignment? You bet your bottom dollar I did.
Goal number three encompasses a lot. Practice good writing? I sure hope I did. Culminate your research with good editing techniques? – Of course. Not to sound conceited, but I would sure hope that I knew how to do this coming into this course. This goal relies on the skeleton of what the writing process is. I could point to every assignment that I did to show you how I used the sources, editing and proper planning and provisioning to make my assignment one that I’m proud of. Along the same lines, goal number four is pretty rudimentary. Do I believe I practiced good reading in English 11011? Yes, especially in regards to ’20 Something Essays…” That book was not what I would call a casual read. Each essay had something that made it the most awkward piece of literature to read, but did I struggle through it enough to have a valid response? – Yes.
I’m going to trim down my responses to goals five and six because I want to get to the more personal side of English 11011 and how it affected me.
For goal five the online blogging went hand in hand (once more – blogging comes up as a misspelled word). It was something new to me and I think it’s brilliant. I can go back to the blog forever and ever and evaluate how much my writing has improved. That to me is such a special thing. Also, the online database EBSCO that I used for my MGRP was astonishingly cool. It made research a breeze and I’ll never be able to count how many hours I saved in the library using that tool.
Goal six is the ability to integrate previous research with your own research in order to form a good perspective. I keep going back to it, but the MGRP culminated this very well and I think I accomplished this goal. So many articles and books online had great points that I wouldn’t have know off the top of my head, but at the same time, for my argument I also had researched opinions that I wanted to add to it and I believe I was successful in this regard.
Now, I’ve got a little over two-hundred words to tell you my personal opinion on this class and my experiences. Firstly, my classmates: they truly made this experience enjoyable. Did I know everyone? – Of course not, but by the end of year I’m sure they knew my lousy voice and name.
My favorite assignment was the photo essay. It was just so cool and I didn’t know I could edit a short video with such good results. It was a pleasant, fun surprise. Of course, the most challenging assignment was the MGRP. I will not lie. During the last week of the assignment I spent a good twelve hours in the library doing both research and writing. It was stressful, yet enjoyable – which is ironic.
In closing, I really liked this class. The teacher was just the right mix of funny and yet a valuable asset to my clueless-ness. The time couldn’t have been worse, but I think that made it that much more quirky. The writing assignments were edgy, and anything but traditional, which rocked. This class will always be remembered as that crazy writing class at 7:45 in the morning where I finally learned how to step out of my comfort zone when writing.
No comments:
Post a Comment