Dear Student:

My name is Vanessa , I would like to share with you my experience taking the English 1121 course. English 1121 was the first class I took fully online. It is also a-synchronized which worked perfectly for me since I’m also a full time employee.I was happy that I quickly adapted to the online curriculum . It helped a lot that the Professor made sure the instructions were simple and clear to follow; she even posted videos on how to navigate through the website.  Every week we had a reading and writing assignment due. These readings and small writing assignments helped guide and mold the bigger projects. A reading assignment that I found interesting was a piece written by John Swales on Discourse Communities. This reading taught me how to identify the characteristics of a discourse community. John Swales describes Discourse Communities as “groups that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals.”. It was beneficial learning about Discourse Communities because it helped me understand their  importance when addressing an audience in a letter or a speech.

Another assignment that I learned a lot from and that I will be carrying with me is the Annoted Bibliography project. This assignment is an excellent way of collecting and summarizing information for research. It taught me how to conduct research using online library databases and how to properly list a Bibliography with citations. This will come useful in the future if I need to conduct research and have different sources to list. It will help me organize my information collected and also help summarize and evaluate my sources.

 

In the end, this class was tough but fair. An advice for someone taking this class is to try and complete all the assignments on time so you don’t fall behind. Especially since these assignments will later on be used to form your larger assignments. I’m glad I got the chance to challenge to my self and become a better writer.  I will certainly carry over a lot of the things I learned in this semester into my future writing.

Sincerely,

Vanessa Furini