Final: Reflection Portfolio
Over the course of ENG1020 I have grown as a student in all four learning outcomes that were presented to us at the beginning of the semester. These being: reading, writing, research, and reflecting. I believe that with the help of projects and the side assignments; I have been able to grow and reach new levels as a student at Wayne State. With the use of my previous projects and a revised copy of a previous project; I will be able to show and explain how I have grown in the four learning outcomes of ENG1020.
The reading outcome of the course states that we as students must use reading strategies to identify, analyze, evaluate, and respond to text. I did this in one of our first blogs at the start of the semester. In a blog post I made titled, “Swales and the Wayne Writer Response”, I compare and contrast what Swales and the Wayne Writer both stated about discourse communities. With this blog, I analyzed and responded. Here I stated:
“As I was reading the two passages I was assigned, I started making connections with the two. For example, both Swales and the Wayne Writer mention genres. They both explain that genres are important in setting an environment. Swales states that we should think of genres as, “textual tools used by groups of people as they work toward their desired ends”. The Wayne Writer describes the doctor’s office as a discourse community with various genres (i.e. prescriptions, referral notes, and letters to insurance companies). Swales also says that all discourse communities use genres. So, both medias are similar with their ideology of discourse communities and their use of genres.”
You could see how I responded to the two different readings and how I was able to analyze both readings in order to see the differences that they had.
Moreover, the writing learning objective of this class stated that students had to compose persuasive academic genres such as rhetorical analysis, arguments, ect. Through the use of editing, publishing, reader review, and our very own shitty first drafts. I grew in this specific outcome by taking my peers critics through the process of reader review and applied it to my final draft. For example, our first project was on genre analysis. I did my project on the discourse Starbucks baristas engage in through cups. With my shitty first draft I wasn’t very detailed with my examples, but with my final draft, I added pictures and got more in depth with the material I was explaining. Here is the first paragraph of my shitty first draft and the first paragraph of my final draft for comparison:
“A discourse community, defined by John Swales, is a group of individuals who all share a common goal in the aspect of writing or reading. Throughout this paper, I will be describing and analyzing a discourse community with a particular genre and lexis. Genres in a community is important because it gives a general understanding amongst the discourse community. The community I decided to analyze was the cups at Starbucks.”
“A discourse community, defined by John Swales, is a group of individuals who all share a common goal in the aspect of writing or reading. According to John Swales, a discourse community needs to have six defined characteristics before it is actually considered a discourse community. A discourse community must have: an agreed set of common public goals, must be able to communicate with other members, provide information and feedback, the community has one or more genres, has a specific lexis, and the community must have some experienced members and some not so experienced members. According to Swales, all of these characteristics build a discourse community.”
Here you can see that I got more detailed through my drafts with the help from the comments of my peers and instructor.
The third learning outcome introduced to the class was research. This stated that as students we had to find, evaluate, and use information we gathered through research from databases and such. I used this learning outcome very heavily in my infographic. I researched through Google Scholar and the Wayne State University library databases to find statistics to make my infographic accurate. Below is a section taken from my infographic that shows health problems that funeral directors and morticians have gotten due to overexposure to formaldehyde.
The last learning outcome presented from ENG1020 is reflecting. This means that we had to use our reflections to plan, monitor, and evaluate our writing. In a blog post titled, “Reader Review Reflection 2”, I talked about how I felt about my peers opinions on my section of my groups paper. Here I stated, “One group said that me explaining logos was good and made the paper clear, but another said it was unnecessary because everyone should know what that is and I should remove it. Honey, I disagree.” You can see how I put in how I felt about the comments and later on in the blog post I talked about how I was going to plan out my revisions. I said, “…I will take them up. I do think that changing my format a bit and adding more quotes would make my section of the essay more clear and easy to understand.”
Through these four learning outcomes given to me, I feel like I have grown as a writer, a reader, a researcher. I really think my evidence proves that I have had some growth, even if it is just the smallest bit. I do not think without the projects given to me, that I would not have grown with research for example. Before, I had never done a research paper, but now I have that expiernece to help me grow more in my upcoming English classes and in my career. The expiernece I have gained from this class will be with me throughout my university career and I can only grow more.
pixelboupublishes 