I came into this class knowing how to write. I knew the basic rules of grammar, syntax, and sentence structure. I knew the parts of an essay, how long paragraphs should be, and what a thesis question was. Yet, I still learned so much in this class. I knew the pillars of writing, but what this class did was transform everything that’s in between knowing the basics and producing a quality product. I learned this through the free-writes, readings, major assignments, group annotations, and finally, the movie project.
The first major assignment we had to turn in was a response to Diana George’s “Changing the Face of Poverty” reading. I have to say, I was pretty happy with what I wrote. The only setback was that it took me forever to write it. Although I really liked the reading, I still agonized over it. I planned for a long time so I remember starting the essay late, and when I did start I would stop every few sentences and change what I wrote. Perhaps this is why I wrote, “However, writing for my actual English classes was much more challenging. I went from writing so freely and easily to quite literally giving birth to my essays. Every essay came with at least nine or more hours of difficult, difficult labor -- I’m serious!” in my first “Writing and Me” free-write. So when we discussed in class the differences in writing styles as well as read Elbow, Lamott, and Perl, I knew for a fact that I was a transmission writer. I approached the readings with hesitation, however. As sad as it is, I couldn’t imagine myself not planning essays and then agonizing over them. However, these readings substantially changed how I approached writing and how I felt about it.
I put my hesitations aside and took all of the readings into consideration, first and foremost, the Elbow article on Process writing. For me, this was the most valuable thing I learned this semester. I love the idea of process writing as I read the article, and I love how I feel using process writing. In fact, I liked the Elbow article and the idea of Process writing so much that I sent the article to a bunch of my friends who struggled with writing in the same ways I did (and they loved it too!). After my experience with the Elbow reading, I was excited to read Perl and Lamott. Reading these articles just made writing make more sense for me. Even now as I’m writing this reflection, I’m taking into consideration my felt sense and am writing keeping the signals my body is sending me in mind. Lamott, too, in combination with the way we turned in essays in this class, changed my idea of writing. After reading her article, I realized that a first draft isn’t a final draft, and I shouldn’t try to make it a final draft. With the Discovery drafts that we had to write, I realized that there’s nothing wrong with a “shitty” first draft. Additionally, the multiple-draft system helped me a lot during the semester. Although I sometimes found it tedious and felt like I was nit-picking some stuff, I honestly think it improved the quality of my final drafts, and I hope my English 220 teacher next semester also has us do multiple drafts.
My favorite major assessments from this semester was the process essay and the movie project. As the name suggests, and as aforementioned, I used process writing for this essay, mainly in the discovery and middle drafts. I think this worked to my advantage and overall, it made initially starting the essay (decidedly the hardest part) a breeze. I was also very happy with the topic I chose. I talk about debate a lot, and I talked about how Performance/Kritikal debate was better for education in actual debate rounds, but I never wrote an essay as to have transformative this style of debate is. I knew a good amount about this style of debate as I was a Performance/Kritikal debater myself, but framing something as nuanced as a rebellious style of rhetoric in an educational activity into an essay made me learn more about it, something I didn’t even expect. The movie project, on the other hand, was just a lot of fun. I think my research project really lent itself to my movie idea--creating mock commercials. Creating the first draft of the movie was the hardest part for me, because I wanted to create parallels between my mock commercial #1 (gender-stereotyping) and mock commercial #2 (no gender stereotyping), I had to anticipate what I would put into the second draft while creating the first draft. After shooting the first draft, I assembled all of the scenes, and was a little disappointed. My mock commercial #1 just looked like a bad home-made movie. However, after navigating imovie, I learned how to play around with some of the effects, so I added ‘50s show tunes and made the video itself black-and-white. Navigating imovie was good at first, but then it turned for the worse. Shooting the actual scenes of mock commercial #2 and adding in the graphs from my research project wasn’t too hard, but imovie crashed and deleted everything but the raw clips after I was completely done with my final movie...twice. At that point, I switched to another software and remade it. Overall, however, I had a lot of fun, especially because my “actors” (a.k.a. Artur and my friend, Caseena) were really good sports about the movie, gave me suggestions, and in my opinion, acted well! Although this idea was ambitious, I’m glad I went through with it because I think it was worth it.
This class challenged me in all the right ways, especially with the group work. I had worked in groups before, but I had never done anything like group annotations or used the same approaches as in the Frick group essay. The group annotations were, overall, good. I think the actual readings lent themselves to discussion, such as the Grecian philosopher’s excerpts, Brandt, Mcluhan, and Freire. I was happy to side, challenge, or add onto what another group member wrote. Conversely, I liked when my group members would do that to my notes on the group annotations. The Frick essay, on the other hand, was pretty difficult. Actually going to the Frick with my group and picking a thesis question or area of interest was really interesting, but researching Frick’s intent to add East Asian artifacts into his collection was, suffice it to say, pretty difficult. However, both Jessica and Mike had a lot of bring to the table in terms of ideas and approaches to the thesis question, so that made the task less difficult. Although I’m happy with our final product, I think we could’ve approached the first draft differently. We all wrote one rough draft ourselves, and then pieced together the best parts from our individual drafts into the group draft. Looking back, I think a better method would have been for each group member to take a different part of the essay upon themselves and then piece all of the parts of the essay together. Everyone writing their own first drafts was not only unnecessary work but didn’t really lend itself to the essay flowing well.
I really liked the approach you (Sean) took in this class. When I first walked in, I thought I had the wrong room number and I accidentally ended up in a Statistics class because of the computers. I was expecting a room with all of the desks facing one way, equal spacing between the desks, and a small shelf of books, not a computer lab. However, I was pleasantly surprised with how well we were able to incorporate technology into class-time. I think the spontaneous free-writes were great, the group notes helped me a lot, and watching parts of movies or commercials was efficient. I also liked how you would ask us what we personally wanted to do or learn, especially towards the end of the semester. I think this is a better approach to just having a strict teacher/student dynamic in which the teacher lectures and the students take notes and pay attention. I definitely have high expectations from my English professor next semester as a result.
The first major assignment we had to turn in was a response to Diana George’s “Changing the Face of Poverty” reading. I have to say, I was pretty happy with what I wrote. The only setback was that it took me forever to write it. Although I really liked the reading, I still agonized over it. I planned for a long time so I remember starting the essay late, and when I did start I would stop every few sentences and change what I wrote. Perhaps this is why I wrote, “However, writing for my actual English classes was much more challenging. I went from writing so freely and easily to quite literally giving birth to my essays. Every essay came with at least nine or more hours of difficult, difficult labor -- I’m serious!” in my first “Writing and Me” free-write. So when we discussed in class the differences in writing styles as well as read Elbow, Lamott, and Perl, I knew for a fact that I was a transmission writer. I approached the readings with hesitation, however. As sad as it is, I couldn’t imagine myself not planning essays and then agonizing over them. However, these readings substantially changed how I approached writing and how I felt about it.
I put my hesitations aside and took all of the readings into consideration, first and foremost, the Elbow article on Process writing. For me, this was the most valuable thing I learned this semester. I love the idea of process writing as I read the article, and I love how I feel using process writing. In fact, I liked the Elbow article and the idea of Process writing so much that I sent the article to a bunch of my friends who struggled with writing in the same ways I did (and they loved it too!). After my experience with the Elbow reading, I was excited to read Perl and Lamott. Reading these articles just made writing make more sense for me. Even now as I’m writing this reflection, I’m taking into consideration my felt sense and am writing keeping the signals my body is sending me in mind. Lamott, too, in combination with the way we turned in essays in this class, changed my idea of writing. After reading her article, I realized that a first draft isn’t a final draft, and I shouldn’t try to make it a final draft. With the Discovery drafts that we had to write, I realized that there’s nothing wrong with a “shitty” first draft. Additionally, the multiple-draft system helped me a lot during the semester. Although I sometimes found it tedious and felt like I was nit-picking some stuff, I honestly think it improved the quality of my final drafts, and I hope my English 220 teacher next semester also has us do multiple drafts.
My favorite major assessments from this semester was the process essay and the movie project. As the name suggests, and as aforementioned, I used process writing for this essay, mainly in the discovery and middle drafts. I think this worked to my advantage and overall, it made initially starting the essay (decidedly the hardest part) a breeze. I was also very happy with the topic I chose. I talk about debate a lot, and I talked about how Performance/Kritikal debate was better for education in actual debate rounds, but I never wrote an essay as to have transformative this style of debate is. I knew a good amount about this style of debate as I was a Performance/Kritikal debater myself, but framing something as nuanced as a rebellious style of rhetoric in an educational activity into an essay made me learn more about it, something I didn’t even expect. The movie project, on the other hand, was just a lot of fun. I think my research project really lent itself to my movie idea--creating mock commercials. Creating the first draft of the movie was the hardest part for me, because I wanted to create parallels between my mock commercial #1 (gender-stereotyping) and mock commercial #2 (no gender stereotyping), I had to anticipate what I would put into the second draft while creating the first draft. After shooting the first draft, I assembled all of the scenes, and was a little disappointed. My mock commercial #1 just looked like a bad home-made movie. However, after navigating imovie, I learned how to play around with some of the effects, so I added ‘50s show tunes and made the video itself black-and-white. Navigating imovie was good at first, but then it turned for the worse. Shooting the actual scenes of mock commercial #2 and adding in the graphs from my research project wasn’t too hard, but imovie crashed and deleted everything but the raw clips after I was completely done with my final movie...twice. At that point, I switched to another software and remade it. Overall, however, I had a lot of fun, especially because my “actors” (a.k.a. Artur and my friend, Caseena) were really good sports about the movie, gave me suggestions, and in my opinion, acted well! Although this idea was ambitious, I’m glad I went through with it because I think it was worth it.
This class challenged me in all the right ways, especially with the group work. I had worked in groups before, but I had never done anything like group annotations or used the same approaches as in the Frick group essay. The group annotations were, overall, good. I think the actual readings lent themselves to discussion, such as the Grecian philosopher’s excerpts, Brandt, Mcluhan, and Freire. I was happy to side, challenge, or add onto what another group member wrote. Conversely, I liked when my group members would do that to my notes on the group annotations. The Frick essay, on the other hand, was pretty difficult. Actually going to the Frick with my group and picking a thesis question or area of interest was really interesting, but researching Frick’s intent to add East Asian artifacts into his collection was, suffice it to say, pretty difficult. However, both Jessica and Mike had a lot of bring to the table in terms of ideas and approaches to the thesis question, so that made the task less difficult. Although I’m happy with our final product, I think we could’ve approached the first draft differently. We all wrote one rough draft ourselves, and then pieced together the best parts from our individual drafts into the group draft. Looking back, I think a better method would have been for each group member to take a different part of the essay upon themselves and then piece all of the parts of the essay together. Everyone writing their own first drafts was not only unnecessary work but didn’t really lend itself to the essay flowing well.
I really liked the approach you (Sean) took in this class. When I first walked in, I thought I had the wrong room number and I accidentally ended up in a Statistics class because of the computers. I was expecting a room with all of the desks facing one way, equal spacing between the desks, and a small shelf of books, not a computer lab. However, I was pleasantly surprised with how well we were able to incorporate technology into class-time. I think the spontaneous free-writes were great, the group notes helped me a lot, and watching parts of movies or commercials was efficient. I also liked how you would ask us what we personally wanted to do or learn, especially towards the end of the semester. I think this is a better approach to just having a strict teacher/student dynamic in which the teacher lectures and the students take notes and pay attention. I definitely have high expectations from my English professor next semester as a result.