I have enjoyed this course, granted this is not what I expected my first term of college to be like but nonetheless, this course was really helpful and superb! I found my self motivated throughout this course as the projects were challenging but not overwhelming, they were challenging enough to keep me engaged. It was really interesting reading my classmates’ answers and getting to know them and also learning about their stories and perspectives. I also have learned new things about myself as a writer and a reader and I think that I have grown and improved in my style of writing.

While comparing my work from the beginning of the term to my work now I realized that most of my work felt restricted and limited as I did not put much personality into the work which made it seem generic or forced. However, now I am not afraid to write in styles that I am comfortable with or even incorporating new genres and approaches which make the work seem more alive and eager. For instance, in one of the assignments I had said “Being able to speak in diverse can help us adapt to changes better and faster. It can help us expand our social network, and it allows us to feel comfortable in the environment we are in, while also sounding natural” (3 Ways to Speak English). in response to a quote. Although these sentences are grammatically correct and make sense they feel off in a sense, they do not sound as natural. In a later assignment, while not drastic I can tell that my writing has improved and I sound more confident writing the sentences. “As a writer and communicator, it is very helpful to think of how the design will come across to the audience and whether or not it is easy to understand and read but also grabs the readers’ attention and make them more interested in the topic. In my presentation, I want to make sure to use a good font size that fits into the circumstances perfectly. I will also try to use visual contrast, by bolding important words, and color-coding appropriately” (Clean Up Your Mess). In these sentences, I can almost hear myself being excited about the project and what I plan to do and I think that is an improvement from my past work which may have sounded dull at times.

My favorite assignment in this course was the “New Genre” assignment. This assignment to me was the one I had the most fun doing, I had to research and get evidence from different sources that I may not have considered in the past. I got evidence from a news article, a TED talk, a research paper, and even a letter to the editor. The letter to the editor was the most foreign genre to me I had never used a letter to the editor as a resource before. This assignment made me realize the variety of resources and genres that can be used while researching and this can be very useful as to not limit the amount or type of information that can be used while writing. It also made me realize that using different genres to write can be just as good if not better depending on the target audience and the execution of the writing.

As a student who had to do a ton of research throughout my school life and even on personal time, I noticed things that make a paper seem like it was done by an amateur even though they were well researched and had a lot of useful information. Thus, in my own writings, I made sure that the format of the paper and organization of my own paper was appropriate and easy to read. I had a couple of issues while figuring out how to do the double-entry journals as I wanted them to look appealing so I experimented in ways that I can use to make them the way I wanted and I found that making a table on google docs and then transferring it into the post was the easiest way for me and it would still hold its appeal. Furthermore, experimenting with tools that are within your reach and seeing which best fits or style or which is most efficient is an important technique that I have learned how to utilize in my own writing.

At the beginning of this course, I believed that I knew many different styles of writing. “I am familiar with different forms of writing” (How to Read Like a Writer). Since then I have been exposed to lots of writing styles and genres that I was not familiar with and did not know that I could use and make my papers more versatile. I will be looking into the styles I have not been exposed to before and try to learn their benefits and how I can incorporate a larger variety of styles in my own style, and I hope on building on and further improving my own style.

As a reader and a writer, I have learned a great deal of information about myself. I have learned that reading daily inspires me to write, whether I would write a poem or stories, I mostly get my inspiration from reading or even hearing something such as a specific topic sometimes it sparks an urge in my brain to write. I learned that the target audience can determine a lot of things about what you are going to write. That even if you write the most sophisticated piece can be pointless if consideration of the audience is ignored, the reader comes for their own purpose after all. Finally, the most important thing I learned was to write about something you are passionate about or are interested in, you never know what you write might inspire someone else. Writing is a powerful tool that can change someone’s life it certainly changed my life for the better.