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Reflection
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The author was just listening to Strangers by Ethel Cain, if you wanted to know
Over the course of this quarter, I have learned a great deal about reading and writing. I have learned how to construct nonfiction narratives, how to write compelling blog posts, and how to synthesize documents, as well as connect them when necessary. I also learned how lovely a contract grading system is. It takes quite a bit of the anxiety out of submitting writing assignments since you know exactly what is expected of you and what grade you will earn. I learned a lot about effective writing through the assignments for this quarter, especially since there was a substantial amount every week (not complaining, I appreciated the writing practice).
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Everything that I learned through my assignments was further reinforced through feedback from my instructor, as well as peer reviewers. The assignments that stuck out to me the most were the blog posts. I found those to be so fun and such a nice change of pace from regular academic writing. My favorite blog posts were #4: Review/Critique, #5: Document Analysis, and #8: Multimodality. They made me realize that I really do enjoy unconventional/non-academic writing and that I should pursue it more often.
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It also made me realize the importance of adapting my tone and style of writing to match the more informal setting of a blog post and appeal to a broader audience, which is in line with our Course Learning Goal #6, which states that our assignments should “help students develop a clear, lively, and forceful prose style, and adapt that style to different writing situations and audiences.” I also enjoyed writing Essay #1: Testimonial, as it gave me an opportunity to construct a compelling narrative encompassing a broader point of view. This, as well as the blog posts, is in line with Course Learning Goal #4 because it gave me “an opportunity to explore a variety of non-fiction writing forms including narrative, analysis, explanation, argument, and critique.”
As I stated above, this class taught me that I really do enjoy writing as a hobby. I was looking forward to the start of each week because I genuinely enjoyed all of our writing assignments. Through my work in this class, I have also learned to be a more effective advocate for the issues I care about because I now have more experience arguing in favor of my position, as well as synthesizing research and integrating evidence into my writing. This will most likely be very helpful for my future as a student. As a psychology major, I write many research papers, so it is great to get more concrete experience and feedback on my evidence-based writing, especially when it requires synthesizing multiple sources together to establish a solid position. This writing practice will also be very helpful in the job market. I now have a portfolio of short and compelling blog posts that demonstrate my experience with editorial writing.
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As this class wraps up, I feel that my greatest strengths were time management skills. Fortunately enough, I never missed an assignment and I always budgeted enough time to complete each assignment well. I also feel like my typing skills have improved, and I can now type faster than I could at the beginning of the quarter, simply because I got so much practice typing at least 900+ words per week.
I would say that I still need to work on writing concisely, as I can easily get carried away with my writing and my points end up muddled together. I also need to work on stronger concluding paragraphs, as I feel that when I near the end of a piece of writing, I struggle to briefly reiterate my points and neatly wrap it up without sounding abrupt or redundant. I will have an opportunity to improve on these writing skills soon, as another quarter is starting up and I am sure it will contain quite a few writing assignments, especially lengthy term papers. As a reader, I probably need to work on annotating a document as I go so that I have a good bank of notes to refer to when writing (especially relevant for research papers), and as I stated above, I will have many opportunities to work on this in the upcoming quarter. Psychology classes are quite heavy-handed with the required reading (did you know that psychology professors assign an average of 330 pages of reading a week?)
Some key points that I will take away from this class is that a). advocacy is a lengthy process that requires a great deal of knowledge through personal narratives, research, community involvement, etc.., and b). There is no greater way to become a better writer than consistent and consistent practice. Though it was initially daunting to have so many writing assignments every week, I quickly realized how great it is to have so many opportunities to hone my writing skills, especially since so many writing prompts allowed for a degree of creative liberty. This class also demonstrated to me the importance of continued hard work and conscientiousness. It was because of my previous writing assignments that I did not struggle with the research paper, and that I had such a solid foundation of research to go off of.
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These skills will of course be useful in other classes because they will inspire me to work hard on every assignment so that I make the class and all its future assignments easier and more enjoyable. Learning more about advocacy is so essential for my other classes because, as I mentioned earlier, so many of them rely on research papers, so it is good to be familiar with the process of research and advocacy. Everything that I learned in this class can easily translate into real-world skills. Learning to stay on top of one’s work is not just relevant for school, it is relevant for work, as well as personal responsibilities. Advocacy is also an essential real-world skill, as it offers me the ability to affect real-world change through the strategies I learned in this class, such as constructing a nonfiction narrative, witnessing an issue in action in order to raise awareness for it.
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