midterm reflection, jenna


Midterm Reflection

Since completing half of my semester of ENC 1102, I continue to begin my essay with rhetorical knowledge. When I begin to write an essay I make sure that I know what my purpose is and who I am writing my essay to. When I wrote my essay about writing to explore I choose the purpose of my essay to be what makes a good leader. My essay to inform the purpose was to inform the audience which were my peers about living cultures, a chapter in Earth Democracy, and about sex trafficking. I have learned many ways to be more connected with my audience. By using the wiki, it allows me to very communicate and edit my essay with my group mates very easily. My purpose needs to be very clear in my essays that way I can have all of my audience’s attention. I have learned that the genre that I use needs to be expressed throughout my essay. For example, in my writing to explore essay I wrote about the characteristics and qualities that is takes for someone to be a good leader.  I have also followed a voice and tone throughout my essays. I wrote my first essay in a voice to inform people, I did this by informing my audience with examples of what makes a good leader from an article I had found.

During this course so far, I have found that I have become more of a critical thinker, reader and writer because I furthered my knowledge on the subjects I was researching about. For my essay to inform about sex trafficking, I began looking up videos and watching them rather to use the information for the essay but to learn from it. Having the skills of being more of a critical thinker, writer, and reader is very important to be a strong student because it allows you to learn more than just trying to earn a good grade in your class. To be a good writer, I have learned so far in this course that you need to take responsibility for what you your writing about. It is up to you to figure out the work and do it, or if you choose not to do the work and fail.  While researching my projects for this course, I mainly used the internet to look up articles, information, books, and videos to learn more about my topics of my essays.  An additional research source that I could have used is the USF database to research certain articles and journals. During the rest of this semester I will continue to be a critical reader, thinker, and writing by doing my work for the learning instead of just trying to get a good grade.

                I have learned that my inventing skills for my project I have to start with an outline, a rough draft, and lastly a final draft. I start with my outline to figure out what I’m going to be writing about, and what I will need to research more on. While writing my essay I try to be as organized as possible. I look the information that I wrote about in my outline, write out it in my rough draft, have someone edit that, make corrections to finalize my essay, and then I have my final draft. Working with my peers I have liked a lot so far this semester. When my group mates and I did our writing to inform essay, I liked being able to work with a group of people and gather information to make an essay. It was easy to work well with them because we all divided up the tasks, researched different information, and put it together to make one final essay. I liked working with my group because we were able to help each other out if we needed something or if we did something wrong.  During this semester, I have used videos more than I ever have in an English class. On the wiki website when I submitted information for my group project I linked a video to watch that related with my essay.  

                Editing is a very important in my writing process because it allows one to fix any mistakes they have made before turning in the final copy. I think if someone does not take the time to edit their papers it is a form of apathy because they are not caring about the work they put forth. In our essays we use proper documentations because if you are writing about something that was not already known, you must credit the source the information was taken from. If someone does not cite properly or use the proper documentations for their essay they copy something that is not theirs.

                Halfway through this course of ENC 1102 I have used technology that I have never used before the Wiki website, I never knew until I took this class. This website allows you to make pages, edit them or other people’s pages, link other pages onto a page, and show the calendar of the class’s schedule. My benefit with this website was it was very easy to work with my peers, but at first I had no clue how to use the website since I was not familiar with it.  By using these technologies in my writing, it will helps me as a student because it allows me to work in a different way on my essays and other work.