We are almost at the end of this semester and so far we have done a lot of assignments for this class. Sometimes maybe we had to write a DEJ. Sometimes we had to write summaries. Sometimes we had to write essays. Sometimes we just forgot about grammatical correctness and wrote what our heart wanted. All these assignments at first might just seem like a random bowl of just different questions and assignments but all these questions had a meaning. All these assignments had a lesson behind them. All these assignments taught me something and right now, as we are at the end of the semester, I think this is the perfect moment to talk about what this class has taught me throughout the course. This class categorized us into three different perspectives throughout the entirety of it. Sometimes we saw ourselves as the reader, sometimes as a writer, and sometimes just a scholar. These three perspectives are crucial as they are what makes an author better at their craft. Looking at something from a reader’s perspective helps us understand their taste, what they want and what catches their attention. When we put that through a writer’s perspective, now we realize how to write certain segments in certain ways to get a particular group’s attention. At first, it’s not as easy as it seemed but as we went forward more and more with this class, the concept is more clear now. And that’s what brings me to the last point that I want to discuss, being a scholar. After acquiring all the knowledge from this class, we were categorized as scholars. We were able to detect any sorts of grammatical errors or write in a different way than other students would because we had a different perspective than them, and that’s what makes our papers more fun to read.
One of the important things I overcame in this class was my fear of writing. I would never want to write before. I would think whatever I would write is just not good enough. I also didn’t have a guide as a kid to show me the right direction. So whenever a teacher would tell me to write, I would look at others’ writings and sort of try to come up with my own. Later I realized there is no creativity in that so I started to write by myself again but I still thought it wasn’t good enough for me but the first unit that we did for this class is what helped me overcome my fear. When I first read the First Shitty Drafts document, I realized something big. Writing is something that has to come from within. That’s when the wordplay would be at its best. Because something preplanned would mean you just thought of a scenario in one way. But what if we think about it in different ways? That’s what the unit taught me. It taught me to forget about grammatical errors. Write what I want to write because first drafts will always be “shitty”. But that at least opens up the option of creativity because we can always look back and either add more stuff or perfect the product we have in our hands already. We don’t need to make the most perfect versions on the first try. I mean that’s why they are called drafts in the first place. You are not supposed to waste all the energy on it rather distribute that same energy through multiple drafts and make sure that the final product is perfect. Something that I have learned as a reader is how to understand certain quotes in a reading. We did DEJs throughout the whole semester. It required us to find certain quotes from the article that we liked and analyze them and see what they mean. This was very important as authors loved to indirectly put their messages in the texts. The DEJs helped us understand that about authors and now when I am reading a certain piece of writing I always make sure that I am understanding the true meaning behind it. This had improved my talents as a reader. This brings me to my last point, being a scholar. After I acquired all of this knowledge, I realized I am looking at the perspective of writing differently from everybody. My writing style and another student’s writing style won’t be the same because now have different guidance than that student. The way I would read a sentence the other student would do that. The way I would write a sentence to gain the attention of a certain audience, another student wouldn’t do that. I think that’s what comes with being a “scholar” even though I’m not fully one yet. I write differently than everyone else so if I have to compare my writing to someone it has to be someone who can understand the depths of it just like I do.
All these months, every week we always learned something new. We always learned something different, learned to look at certain things from a different perspective. We always kept learning with an open mindset and I think that’s what’s so important. A lot of the time people don’t want to change their style, their ways. This class, on the other hand, will show you why that’s wrong and why you have to have an open mindset when you are writing. You have to make sure that when you are writing something you don’t just write it in one style, you have to be able to target different audiences through different texts. If it’s only one audience every single time, then no one would know about ur writing since only one group of people would know about it. The articles we read helped us become better readers, the essays we wrote helped us become better writers, and the knowledge we gained in that process helped us become better scholars. Even though I have a career in Computer Engineering, these pieces of information will come in handy in my future career events.
