Reflective Introduction
My experience with writing classes has always been positive. What has always worked for me was getting feedback, and writing what comes to mind. It has been a while since I have taken a writing class in person since the pandemic started. I felt like I had forgotten everything that I had learned prior and because of that, I began 39B with not so much confidence in my writing. From my process assignments to free writing exercises, looking back it's surprising to see that I was able to do all of that with other classes that have a heavy course load. In this class, we had to do a lot of in-depth analysis, reflections, and writing exercises. With this, I learned about new modes of writing, conventions, and the importance of applying what you learn to bigger assignments or ideas.
Process Assignments
Free Writing Exercise :
This is the writing sprints exercise we had to do in class about the tale we chose for our GA essay. Throughout the assignment, I talked about the tale’s conventions, and its rhetorical situations, and made this outline to brainstorm my writing. Even though I like how I structured this outline, it's very brief and by the 2nd draft, this whole outline wasn't so helpful because I rewrote most of my paper. I ended up doing multiple outlines, most of which I wrote on a whiteboard to collect my ideas as best as possible. It was helpful for me to do this free writing exercise because I got a general idea of the topics I wanted to explore in my GA. Because I chose Little Red Riding Hood, most of the ideas are the ones I got from what I was able to do in my process assignments blog posts. In that sense, I used my previous work and analysis and implemented them into 2 related assignments.
LRRH Trials & Tribulations
Reading Reflections:
Both of these reflection exercises helped me grasp and think a little more about the text I read. Both of these examples are from section 3 of the reflection assignment which is to write in detail about a piece of text we decided to annotate. I chose those specific pages to annotate because I felt they were the ones that I was able to put the most analysis into. What I noticed from these 2 is that I connect them to the idea of how women were portrayed in these tales by their society at the time. The comments I received from Professor Wren on the assignment pointed out that I made pretty dense observations about what I read.
Blue Beard
Feedback
These were two of the comments I received on my GA. I did what I could about embedding quotes, but I struggled with making a strong analysis after. My peer review was suggesting what to add to expand my ideas. This ties into my outline because even though I added quotes, I struggled to follow up with an explanation.
This was one of the comments I gave on the GA. In class, we were given a format for embedding quotes that I implemented in the essay that I thought could also be useful for the classmate I peer-reviewed.
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Results
I had to rewrite my intro to be more concise and better explained. It took me a while to come up with something I was satisfied with in the first draft, but surprisingly, I was able to rewrite most of the intro in a few minutes with a free writing exercise in class. Along with rewriting my outlines and figuring out my main topics, I could fix up my thesis to better align with my paragraphs. There was another exercise in class that had us practice making titles for our essays. As seen in the first screenshot to the left, the title of my first draft was 'fairytales', but with the help of another exercise, I came up with 2 titles to pick from, one which became my title as seen on the right.
One thing this particular assignment introduced me to was the idea of conventions, specifically fairytale conventions. I didn’t completely know what it was or how I could use it correctly in a way where I had enough evidence to back up my claim.
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In contrast to the GA assignment, the Imitation project podcast didn't have to be as formal. We each took on a role to review a film adaptation of a movie. Considering that for homework I chose to listen to a podcast on hoodwinked, I was familiar with the way this had to be structured. My writing tends to be very “academic” that is, I’m not very creative with my writing, but since this was a podcast and I have listened to a lot of those, I didn't find it hard to make a script that doesn't sound robotic. I took on the role of a film critic, so in the screenshot below, I made an analysis of the animation and gave my opinion about the film as a critic would do. I even used an external resource which we have been practicing how to apply to our writing. This assignment focused more on multimodality and how the film adaptations use it, and how we can use some modes for our own assignment. Since we moved onto this assignment pretty quickly, my peer and I were adding conventions and treating it like the GA. It wasn't until we realized this was not all the assignment was asking us to do. Since identifying and applying multimodality in this manner was new to us, we struggled at first. But by the time of the final draft we took into consideration our peer and teacher feedback.
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Conclusion
By taking this course, I learned to appreciate drafts and feedback even more than I already did. One new thing that I came to learn about was how helpful the process assignments were. although they were tough at times, and I felt like I was being repetitive, I could practice expanding my analysis which ended up coming in handy when it came to my GA and IP. Process assignments were simple which is why I often left the work until the day it was due. That now makes me realize that had I given myself more time, I would probably have produced better results and struggled less with my GA outlines. I can take what I learned from this class, both in writing skills and work habits. By the time I take my next writing class (39C), I will be more prepared than before I took 39B.