Reflection

    When I arrived on the first day of class I was anticipating the exciting new curriculum. I had the instructor for a previous class and was very satisfied from the amount of knowledge and experience I had gained from the instructor. This previous experience contributed to the excitement I had for this next class. After the first day of class I realized what to expect. I was pretty nervous when we went through how we are going to be blogging online and having peers read our essays and give us feedback, because I had never blogged before. However I was also anticipating the start of our blog postings because the instructor made the class material very interesting.

               

     The third post we had to do was integrating voice. While thinking of what to write for this post I struggled quite a bit because I could not figure out exactly how I should incorporate my voice into certain articles. As time passed I started thinking of what my intention as a writer is, and what I am trying to portray to the audience. This aided me in writing my post because I discovered that if you think critically of what you’re trying to portray to the audience and how you are going to use your words, in the end you will have an excellent piece which you are satisfied with. A major problem I had with this writing assignment was that I could not find an appropriate article to write about.  But I thought about how voice integrated along with an informative article can be more appealing and expressive to an audience so I thought about a personal experience, from which I could use empathy as a tool to make my writing assignment more effective.

      Our second post rewriting the news appealed to me a great amount. This is because a lot of times when I had read various news articles I would constantly come across articles that would not make sense. What I mean by that, is the articles would have information at the end that should have been at the beginning and did not establish adequate context.  So I learned that you have to use appropriate style, tone, and format to the writer’s purpose and audience. When I wrote my assignment I knew that I had to keep my audience in mind, because if I didn’t the article would become less effective in presenting information which is my ultimate goal. For example I rewrote an informative news article and it was originally wrote in a big clump of writing,  I realized that this big clump of information is not effective at all to the reader because it lacks the visual supplementation to interest the reader. So what I did is that I put the information into small sections with headers and established context at the beginning to what the article was about. Overall I learned how to keep the audience in mind in order to make my article more effective.

       At first I thought that the process analysis essay was going to be easy. But I learned that it was more difficult than I thought. In my first draft I wrote about how to build a restaurant and after it was done I thought it was perfect. But the next day we had peer reviews which was one of my favorite parts of class, because through that I had the opportunity to make my essay better, and also had the opportunity to critique my peer’s essays which also contributed to my skills as a writer. Through the peer review I realized that I had to add headers in my essay which are very important for process analysis essays, because it visually supplemented the content of your essay in which someone is trying to accomplish what you have written. Another thing I realized was that it is necessary to have your steps completely in order because the audience has to have an exact replica of your finished product. Overall this essay made me realize the importance of visual supplementation to an essay and how it can organize your essay to make it more effective for the audience.

      At the end of this class I realized that every single one of the essays I wrote made me think of how to make my writing more effective. Back at my high school my teacher would give us a prompt and make us write an essay on it. This class made me actually think about my purpose as a writer, and how I should convey my message to the audience, because that overall makes an effective writing piece. Now that this amazing class with a brilliant instructor has come to an end, I have thought about what I can pursue in the future when it comes to writing. Posts such as rewriting the news and integrating voice have given me a keen interest in going into journalism. This class has increased my writing skills a great amount, and through this experience I am looking forward to my future writing classes with great confidence.