Final Reflection

 This is the final reflection going over basically everything we did over the semester. In this essay I talk about each of the three major assignments of the semester, what new skills learned in the class, the strengths and weaknesses I had while doing the class, and the overall benefit I got from the class.

Final Reflection

Our first major assignment for the semester was writing an academic success proposal. My topic was over the struggles of being a full-time worker and taking college classes online. My thesis statement for this assignment was that, in my opinion the simplest way to balance my busy schedule with my academic needs is to plan far into the future and stick to a consistent schedule with the use of planners, calendars, and any other tools that allow me to build my schedule. For this assignment I created a rough draft and then revised it based on my instructor’s feedback but other than that I didn’t do too much preplanning or any in depth organizing or brainstorming. I work best by just writing rough drafts and going from there.

The second big project we did this semester was the annotated bibliography. For this project I chose the short story The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe and then had to find eight academic journals to use as sources for the bibliography. This project did actually prove to be a little challenging for me because I’ve never had to use an online academic database to search for sources before and I’ve also never looked for academic journals to use as sources in a project before either. Once I was able to find my eight sources it was pretty easy for me to follow the rest of the guidelines and write a four-sentence summary of each source for how they could be used and why they are credible. Overall, the assignment wasn’t too difficult, but it did challenge me more than the academic success proposal did.

The third big project for this semester was the short story book jacket project. It started weeks before with the annotated bibliography and from there I had to then pick four of those use for the book jacket for quotes about the story. I also had to create a power point and find an image to represent the short story as well as write a brief summary of the story and a brief description of the author for the book jacket. Despite how large this assignment was it was actually pretty easy for me because for the weeks leading up to the book jacket being due, we had already done most of the work for the project through the other assignments. All of my sources were already gathered, I had already written a no spoiler summary of the story and the only new thing I had to do for the final project was find an image that represented the story well and write a brief description of the author. Both tasks were pretty simple to complete, to find the image for the story I just had to dig around google images for a little while and writing a description of the author was simple because one of my previous sources that I had used for the quotes on the project also provided background information on Edgar Allan Poe that I could quote and use in my own biography of him. Overall, this assignment was also pretty simple to complete and wasn’t very challenging to get done.

Learning Outcomes:

·       I learned to appropriately respond to various rhetorical situations, purposes, and audiences. I know I achieved this learning outcome by completing the three different major assignments which all required I used different strategies for each. I know that I appropriately responded to different audiences based on the positive feedback I got from my classmates during peer reviews and from my instructor’s feedback on the assignments I turned in.

·       I learned to use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating. I know that I achieved this because I had to inquire during my writing when looking for sources, and through my writing in this class I learned many new fundamentals in formatting and citing sources that I didn’t know before. I also used lots of thinking while completing my assignments and communicated frequently through peer reviews and discussion boards.

·       I learned to integrate my original ideas with those of others. I did this by using the feedback provided by my classmates and instructors to improve my assignments.

·       I learned to develop flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proofreading.  I did this by revising and editing my rough draft for each of my major assignments while also taking feedback from others to help develop new strategies each time I went back to generate ideas or revise old ones.

·       I learned to use collaborative writing processes. I used the processes of revising, editing and proofreading throughout the semester for every major assignment.

·       I demonstrated knowledge of structure, paragraphing, tone, mechanics, syntax, grammar, and documentation. I know that I demonstrated all of these through completing each major assignment because my instructor always responded positively to each one I turned in where I had to demonstrate these abilities.

 

·       My biggest strength throughout the year was definitely drafting. I know that was successful with my drafts because for each one that I turned in I got very positive feedback and never had to change anything major from my rough drafts to my final drafts besides minor grammatical or formatting errors.

 

·       My biggest weakness throughout the semester with writing was probably my time management. There were times when I let certain assignments get right to a day or two before the due date before I started working on them and it’s definitely something I need to improve on and I have improved on it since the start of the class.

 

Overall Benefit

·       For me the biggest benefit I gained overall was improving my writing and research skills. Since this class had me do different types of essays and writings throughout the course, I got to learn how to successfully write in more than one way. Along with that this class was the first I’ve ever taken where I had to use academic databases and search through academic journals to find sources for my papers which was a very insightful and interesting challenge for me to learn and complete.