Dru Smith
Professor McLaughlin
ENGL 2089
Monday, March 2
Midterm Reflection
So, in this English I came into the class nervous because English has always been one of my worst subjects in school. So, my first English class I took freshman year was pretty easy and I was happy with my performance. Compared to this class it has been a little more complicated with more work added and more complicated assignments. We have done two main projects in this class so far, the profile and the photo caption group assignment. The profile was very interesting to me because I was able to profile one of my best friends and was able to tell his story through my eyes. I think that the story I was able to tell with the profile was something that a lot of different college students could read and feel some type of connection to it. But with the photo caption group project I feel as if we as a group were able to really come together and put a very well-done project together. We were able to take social media and split it up into completely different subjects but still create a project that complimented each other. So by being able to do this I feel as if my writing has already improved by so much in the first 6 to 7 weeks of this course.
As for what the Activist is, I have an understanding that it is a place where amateur writers such as myself have a chance to put their writing out there for other college students to read. Even if it’s not the best writing, people won’t care because they know these are other college students just like them and everybody has learning curves when it comes to writing. Writing isn’t something that people can just be amazing at right away, it takes a deep understanding of the English language to really become a great writer. As for a discourse community this is where people can come together to write about certain things, and they all pick a certain genre. Now people might think of genre as fiction or nonfiction, but for this example genre can be almost anything because it stands for what you are talking about and what your subject is. This allows you to have a variety of options when it comes to thinking of something to write for the community because you can pick something that really interests you and maybe a lot things haven’t been written about that topic. So, it allows for you to be unique and let people really see who you are as a writer. So, the things we have done to relate to the discourse community and genre are the projects we have done so far. The profile was something that people could read in a certain subject but if they didn’t want to read a profile they could have easily gone onto another part of the Activist and read about something else if they wanted. As for the genre portion the photo caption project really ties into that because it allowed us to pick whatever we wanted to talk about and how we wanted to do it. This freedom allows us to make an even better project because we have the freedom to do what we want so we won’t get bored with a topic that someone else assigned to us. That’s how we can relate our projects to the discourse community and genre in this class.
As we dig even deeper into this subject that we call genre and discourse community we begin to see a pattern with what we have done so far. I look back on the Friday posts as something that has become very useful for me in forming all of my thoughts before I truly begin to get all of my main ideas out on paper. We have done a total of 7 Friday posts I believe and all of them have provided me with enough practice and effort that has really helped me become a better writer within this class. I feel as if doing the Friday post are an essential part if this class as well because they are a main stepping stone into getting my papers and projects ready for my final draft and ultimately publication. When it comes to publication, I know that my papers have to be perfect and I don’t believe that I have written a perfect paper yet in this class. So, by doing the Friday posts I feel as if they are setting me up to eventually write the perfect paper that I am hoping to write by the end of this semester. Other small things that we do throughout the semester that really help me out are the in-class journals that we do. These are a small and short part of the class but I feel as if the in depth questions that you ask us really help us with the overall process of thinking about how we can get our ideas flowing and even evaluate who we are as a writer and how we are continuing to get better. It’s these little things that I feel have really helped me throughout this first part of the semester that have allowed me to be successful in this class and will continue to help me be successful so that way I can become the best writer I can and be able to get to be able to write that perfect paper.
So, in conclusion I feel as if the profile that we have done, and the group presentation have allowed us to work on our group skills and our writing skills. These two big projects have allowed us to tie in genre and discourse community into one and allowed us to work together on something that turned out to be a great project. But also, we have learned about the Activist and all the great stuff that comes with it. The Activist is something that we will all use within this class and is something that can allow us to show our work off to the public community of UCBA, and I have come to the conclusion that allowing people to see your work is very valuable to me because that’s how you get constructive criticism is the best way to gain information on how to improve my writing. Finally, I discussed how the little things allowed me to gain knowledge as a writer such as the Friday posts and the in-class journals have helped me become a better and more knowledgeable writer. That’s what we have done the first half of the semester and can’t wait to see what we learn in the second half of the semester.
Presentation Link
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yLZCiU9vhc9jTHL1RrWqqMESn6tj-yNm3aW2kgO_RoE/edit#slide=id.p
Dru Smith 