Self Reflective Final

For me this class has been part of the greater transformation and learning experience and growth that I have undergone throughout this semester. Being fresh out of high school posed several difficulties and challenges for me. Learning to be responsible, punctual, and adult are a few of the many road blocks that I ran into. Throughout high school I traveled and moved a lot, so I was always cut a little more slack than the rest of the students in my classes because I was perpetually new and adjusting.

This class in particular, with its weekly assignments, relatively faster pace than high school, and significantly stricter deadlines, was one of my first challenges. I've never been one of the people that does their homework regularly and on time. It has helped me learn quite a bit about my own writing abilities, pace, and processes. My greatest difficulty was with the weekly blog assignments and comments, I never remembered to do them, I was too busy doing other things on my weekends, and during the week I was barely managing showing up to class, but eventually I caught on to the fact that they were necessary to my passing the class and got a lot better at doing them.

Throughout the course of the class I learned a significant amount about myself, my strengths and weaknesses, as well as just how I go about writing. Before this semester I have never had to write so much so often and in such a tight time frame. Another difficulty I faced was writing without guidelines as detailed as those that had previously been provided in high school writing classes. I did however adjust, although it may have taken me a little longer than I would have liked.

I learned a lot more about what "good" is. In my opinion, good writing is writing that captures the reader, interests them, educates them, challenges their ideas, and makes them think. Throughout this course I think I have portrayed some good writing and some not so good.

My best writings by far where the observational essay and the rhetorical analysis essay. In those I really made an effort and put my heart into the writing. The observational essay was good writing and also followed the guidelines and expectations of the assignment. But my rhetorical analysis essay was good writing that did not necessarily follow the guidelines of the assignment as much as it could have.

I've found that I put a lot of effort into writing good endings that leave the reader wondering, and make them think about the piece they just read. That is evident in the ending of my rhetorical analysis:

" These videos, these small acts of courage, courage to stand up and demand freedom, freedom of speech, and of expression, provide a world in which Arabs can freely mold, shape, and assert their identities in whatever way they choose, regardless of whether or not they are an accurate indicator of social, cultural, and political change that allows them to do so in the real world. What matters is that they are all small but sure steps in the right direction. Thomas Jefferson said, "Every generation needs a new revolution," if that's the case, this one is about a millennium and a half past due."

One of my weaker points however was writing a strong thesis statement. For the most part the majority of my writings were lacking a distinctive thesis statement all together like in my extra credit write up of the Daniel Alarcon reading and in my observational essay.

I realized that one my greatest strengths by far is writings where I was arguing a point and supporting my opinion like in the sex appeal writing about the Calvin Klein advertisement, Sex Sells No Matter What You're Selling.

In the beginning of the semester when weekly posts had to be 500 words I had a lot more difficulty completing them because I felt it was hard to find 500 words to say about the topics given. The reduction in length really helped with that, I was writing a lot less nonsense and babble.

I had also never written in a blog before, much less blogged for a class, it took quite a bit of getting used to especially with the use of multimedia and hyperlinks. Initially I didn't know what to hyperlink in my text or what pictures or video to use, but eventually I started to enjoy incorporating them in my text. Having our assignments be due online was really a lot of fun because there's so much more you can do when it's online. All in all, this class was a great learning experience, I learned a lot about myself, my learning and that I should really be more open to doing things differently because it could turn out to be better than other ways.