I don’t think of myself as a writer, and still to this day I don’t think of myself as a writer but I have become more confident in my writing compared to how difficult my first writing assignment felt to me in class. Throughout the units, I have developed and achieved the course learning objectives. In each unit, I have steadily begun to learn and develop these learning objectives with the strategies provided by my professors. From the first unit to the second unit, I was able to increase my language and grammar. In Unit 2, I have been able to apply the strategies that I have learned to my writing, making it more clear and concise. A major improvement that I discovered is a way around writer’s block. The method that I’ve been using is heavily inspired by an article called “Shitty First Drafts”. Using this method not only allowed me to get over writer’s block but also allowed me to pass the word requirement, which at the beginning was pretty difficult for me because I didn’t know how to stretch my ideas out. One thing I had to do in the class that I don’t typically do is write a story about my experiences. It may seem easy at first, but for me, it’s so easy to hide behind a character that I made because I can write him/her based on anything I want, but with writing about my own experiences, I have to pick my brain and express everything that I felt at that moment. 

In the first unit, a weakness that I had was that I didn’t go in-depth. I would talk about my writing on a surface level. This is a weakness for me because it doesn’t give the reader enough to go off of. I identify good writing when I can visualize what the author is saying and paint a clear picture. I plan to combat this by taking extra time and putting more effort into actually explaining each topic before transitioning to another one. In the second unit, the writing strategy that I used to combat this issue was the rhetorical situation worksheet because it helped me identify what I wanted to say on a more analytical level while letting me visualize who the reader would be. In Unit 2 using the rhetorical situation worksheet for McNeil’s “English is for everybody,” It gave me a sense of what the reader wanted the readers to know and what rhetorical devices he used.

My perception on what writing is and does has evolved this semester from thinking it was about a question and an answer to it being multiple variations of solutions to a problem. There isn’t any right or wrong answers in writing; it depends on how you want to answer the problem. My classmates have helped me develop my writing with there feedback and ideas. For example, Dubs was a book full of memoir poems, and when I first read these poems I didn’t understand anything that was going on in the series. The poems were not connected in any way to my initial thoughts, and it took me multiple times to reread the same poem in order to get a gist of what it’s talking about. What made understanding the poems easier was discussing my ideas and thoughts with my classmates. On our trip to Gantry Park, me and my classmates researched together so that we could gather more refined information. With the amount of time my friends and I spent at the park, we identified a lot of interesting things. One thing we noticed that I’d never seen before was that there were wooden benches that had a sign that commemorated people’s loved ones. it was such a heartfelt view because it feels as though, while they lost someone precious to them, they will never be forgotten as they are a piece of history. We also noticed how there was some artwork at the park, especially a sculpture made by Manuel Ferrero Badia in 2016. I feel like it’s a good way to incorporate small artists and also to bring in more artists to be known. If I had to describe the sculpture, it was like a contorted block of steel. To me, it doesn’t look like art, but someone else with a better taste for artwork may see something unique.

Unit 3 helped me with my cited sources because in our podcast, we had to find solutions for a problem using research from the internet. Learning to cite our sources was an important part of our podcast, so we don’t get flagged for plagiarism. With some examples of cited sources, it helped us on our bibliography page when completing the podcast. 

In conclusion, throughout my experiences with this class my greatest achievement was being able to improve my endurance and be able to fully thaw out my thoughts onto the paper. In each unit, I have steadily begun to learn and develop these learning objectives with the strategies provided by my professors and my perception on what writing is and does has evolved this semester from thinking it was about a question and an answer to it being multiple variations of solutions to a problem.