Category: Reflection

          Acceptance speeches are speeches said by the recipient of an award or prize. In all of the speeches that I looked at for my topic I noticed that everyone was very considerate. They want to make sure that the other nominees don’t feel bad and sometimes will even talk about them and why they also deserved this award. The speeches usually start off very slow and get more touching throughout the entire speech. Most of the famous speeches are given at the Oscars so you best believe that the world will be watching. Speakers such as Leonardo Decaprio used that to his advantage as he talked about global warming. It made an immediate impact as global warming was one of the most searched topics on google the very next morning. The speakers tend to be very open as some of them even cry and use emotional appeal to connect to their audience. Recipients  usually try their best to gain sympathy from their audience as they will say how they how they struggled a lot early on in their life and convince their audience that if they never give up, they can achieve anything. These speeches almost always open and close with the speaker thanking his or her friends, family and everyone who was there for them. What I learned while watching and listening to the speeches was how the speakers will almost always try to be down to earth and use simple words to really reach their audience. When you use fancy words that your audience can’t understand they tend to drift off and not pay attention. So the speakers will tend to just write the bare minimum and just try to say everything off of the top of their head. I also learned that the speeches will tend to be really short, two to three minutes each. The speakers tend to do that because the more they say the less value it holds. It will also bore their audience if the speech is five whole minutes long. What i would like to learn is how the speakers can come up with such deep and touching speeches and say them in front of thousands of people and millions to see. 

 

        What I learned about myself as an author is that sometimes you learn from your own writing. As I was reading and watching these speeches I didn’t connect to them but when I started to write about them, I began to have a better understanding about them and relate to them more. I realized that you can’t make a reader understand your writing if you yourself aren’t confident and can’t relate to what you are writing about. When I was watching the Kevin Durant’s MVP speech I wasn’t really affected by it even though I was watching a grown man cry in front of thousands of people and say how his mom struggled a lot to put food on the table. When I started writing about it though it was a whole different story because I felt like I was writing about my dad growing up. He also had a hard time as he was the only son who had to provide for his family as well. It really touched me because it felt like I was in the audience and my dad was giving the speech. Going forwards I would like to use more details in my writing and I will also like to state them clearly.

 

The genre that I choose is Hip Hop, the source I use are articles and short stories, the 4 things in common is all the source I use are all trying to promote Hip hop, I can see that the author are all using the excited tone to promote Hip Hop. Secondly, all the stuff that I read are all talking about certain artists, such as  Jackson Wang, J. Cole, Kanye West and other famous rappers, we can also see other things that are in common, we can see that the author are all showing the coffident on them self, and they are also believing that Hip Hop was the best type of music, they tell people that hip hop are getting more and more popular every year, lastly the authors all trying to show off about the music, or them self; On the other hand, there are also some differences between each source, for example, some articles are song from one of the author, some are promoting the songs from other well known artists, some of the articles are about biography for some artist, and tells the history of Hip Hop.

Moreover, some of the things that I’ve learned from the sources I pick is that Hip Hop is a part of New York’s culture, and it spread all over the world, but in some countries it is an underground thing, I learn that all the rapper and are trying to show off, they show brave and confident, which is something that I need a lot, I also learn in order to become strong, your heart should also be strong, just like the song that Jackson Wang wrote. Lastly, there are some I still want to learn from the genre, I want to learn how to be more confident, and why the rapper are showing that they are so confident, what they have bent through their life, this is also something I need to know about my self.

As a writer, though this assignment, I learned that I have to improve my self more, I should also be more confident in myself, I need to start working harder, the sources that I pick can be stronger, and more related to the genre, I also found some of my strength, I am very good at planning my time, and planning the structure, I had a hand in everything on time, But when it comes to my weakness, there are so many things I need to work on, I have learned to communicate with others, when I did the pair editing, I have to work more on my grammar and spelling, I make a lot of mistakes when I was writing, I can also improve the sources, I can find more sources that are better than what I’ve used.

In order to enact those changes, I need to read more, some I can know how to write better, I should learn more about writing because I know my selves is a horrible writer, I should learn how to write better, and make it look more professional, working harder than the pass, and I know that these are the best way I use.

Aboubacar Kone

November 15, 2019

 

What  I learned about myself as a writer throughout the assignments is that my ideas and claims are all over the place, I get bored with writing , I would rather listen to a book then read or watch the movie first it’s more interesting that way for me. This has been a problem for me throughout elementary to my senior year of Highschool. When I write a paper a lot of ideas running through my head so I try to implement them into my writing before I forget what it was so I just put it into my paragraphs. I improved when once my teacher gave us a template to organize the introduction, body , conclusion and with evidence and a claim . Recently with “Cat Person” the short story the text was a little too long for me to read with a short attention span So my classmate recommended me to listen to it instead since that worked for them, so I took the advice and it worked I was engaged and read along with the reader. My Strengths as a writer are citing evidence, vocabulary, and spelling . I started to like citing evidence in a class argument one time in Highschool it was a Socratic seminar and my evidence helped my claim , just identifying text isn’t hard for me so it’s no issue to me . My vocabulary has been great ever since I was a kid because I used to read a lot of books and there was usually big words so I would ask my older sibling what the word meant and pronounced it on my own and implemented them into my sentences, I got in trouble a lot cause of that because I used some words that weren’t supposed to be used for a kid in elementary or middle school. My spelling also came from reading books but more particularly from reading a dictionary with some pictures in it . So I usually sat down as a kid looked at words and look at the pictures I wasn’t as dull as a regular text book with pages filled with just words so I never got bored reading the dictionary definitely not the whole thing but certain words. This led me into entering a spelling bee in elementary in 5th grade which I got 1st place in but I messed up once everyone had a life saver but that’s how I got great at spelling. Ways I would like to grow as a writer is being able to mainly learn to organize my writing I feel like important so the audience or readers won’t get confused on what the essay is about it just isn’t a good thing to do as a writer in my opinion.  I can achieve these goals by reading more seeing different writing styles and techniques maybe there’s a different way for me to write because I don’t think I learn the same way as everyone else and I should look into it.This is what I learned about myself from the assignment.

Restaurant Reviews are the best way to figure out where and what is good to eat for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. In order for the authors to draw attention to their reviews, here are some trends I’ve seen in all the reviews. First, the reviews I looked over talked more in a general experience at the restaurants they’ve visited. The reviews talked about how a diverse group of people can go eat at the places, which encourages people to go. Another trend present is that the reviewers had a more formal tone. Also, the reviews I’ve read would rate the famous dishes/ drinks at the venues, to test if its name meets its wonderful taste. Lastly, the reviews express likes and dislikes of the menu and location. Reading about the different restaurants, what I’ve learned is that the experience you have in that one place will impact the restaurant’s credibility and can help or hurt it. This is why some restaurants close down and some multiply in a matter of months. Also, the restaurants need to be at their best every time of the day because they will never expect who is eating their food. Thinking about the reviewers, I wonder how in the first place they became a critic for food/ restaurants? Also, did they go to school for this profession and how do they know what is good or not by the way food tastes. Lastly, how they make a review that can be towards a specific group and/ or to the general public. 

Throughout the annotated bibliography I’ve learned a lot about myself as a person and as a writer. For one, I can be irresponsible and not backup my work, because all of my written bibliographies were lost. This made me realize that I need to start using applications like Google Docs and Microsoft, to guarantee my work being saved. Second, I realized that as a person I need to start looking for certain topics through different venues, for example, I found so many articles in the New York Times and forgot about the requirement of getting the sources from different venues. This realization helped me come to the sense of using different platforms to find what I need with opposing viewpoints or just finding something distinctive from one article from another. Another challenge I faced is timing, which is still a big problem. As a person, I find myself with a full schedule and make time for other concerns and over clutter myself in my thoughts, and tend to forget a lot. To overcome this ongoing challenge, I need to list out everything I need to do and work on the required stuff first. A strength I found out about myself as a writer, is that I get very repetitive in what I’m trying to say. So with this discovery, I used a thesaurus to use other words to make my writing seem better. This is how I overcame my challenges and my strengths.

 

Some poems, like Shakespeare’s are a little harder, they have words that are hard to understand and the way the poets words their poems makes it harder to interpret. The poems I chose have an intense tone. They use emotional appeal to show how deeply in love the poets are towards his/her audience, which is their significant other. I learned many things about my topic, some are that people have many ways to express the way they feel about their lover, and my sources chose poems to appeal to their beloved. Writing a poem to the one you love is a sweet thing to do, and shows that you care about that person enough to put words together to convey how you feel. I learned from Hemingway that when people leave you, it’s not the end of the world. Your heart will just feel an empty void until the right person comes along. I learned from patience that when you love someone and the fire between you disappears, there’s always the ash that remains and that ash is the moments/memories they have with each other. That ash that remains gives hope that that fire will spark and light again. I learned from Cumming that when you love someone, you carry their heart with you because that person is your whole world. I learned from Shakespeare that love isn’t weak, and can’t be calculated, it’s immeasurable. I learned from Tagore that he loves his beloved so much that he believes that he loved his significant other in his past life and will continue to love her in the next. I learned from Dickinson that you have never lived your life until you have loved, it is love that brings us to life. What I still want to learn about my topic is love poems truly effective? Were my sources able to fully convey how they felt to their loved ones, would a love letter be more better and clearer? Do you need to be a master of words to write a truly effective poem? 

 

What I learned about myself as a writer through this assignment was that before I couldn’t interpret poems, especially love poems. However, after choosing this genre, when I found the love poems I started to think of their meaning instead of just reading it, and I became a little better at interpreting them. I think as a writer, my strength is thinking of what to write right away when given a topic, this would be the brainstorming part of my writing process. I would like to be able to become better at analysis, I am terrible at explaining my evidence. I can enact this change by whenever I’m on my analysis part of my writing, I need to focus on that part more, start thinking of what my evidence really means, why the author wrote this, and how it connects to my claim.

After creating and revising my own annotated bibliographies I can now call myself a veteran and someone who has a lot of knowledge about my said topic, which is Short Stories. One thing that all of my sources share is the fact that all of them are fiction. It is possible that Short stories can be non fictional, matter of fact it’s more likely, but I personally chose these sources because of the messages behind them and how popular these sources are. Something else that my sources all share is the fact that they have a message or meaning behind each story that can be related to currently in the world.  I personally feel that short stories should always have a message behind it, it can portray to only the author, or it can portray to a specific audience or it can be relatable to anyone. Another common theme that my sources have is that they are all in third person. Just like the first one, there are multiple short stories that are in second person and first person but I chose these because of personal preference. I can also say that even though all of my sources are short stories, they don’t always have to be related or have anything in common and one of the things that my sources DON’T have in common is the message and meaning behind it. One short story can talk about the progression of technology in society and another can talk about the love of your life. They don’t always have to be the same but they must have a message to convey to their audience. What I learned from my topic was that every short story has a message that can be related to, and that every short story has a clear understanding of who their audience is. What I still want to learn about this topic is the differences between 1st 2nd and 3rd person short stories.

What I learned about myself as a writer is that I love creative writing because of how creative my mind is, I always use figurative language, diction, and imagery to express myself in my own creative writings, and this is what I am attracted to as a reader. I find myself intrigued to creative writings. I would like to continue to grow as writers by exploring other genres to see what I am fascinated by and what I find myself doing as well. In order for me to enact these changes I have to pick out random books from each genre that I find myself writing about and spend weeks and months dissecting these books to understand the meaning behind all of them and how this can be related to short stories.

All the authors talked about the price of the food in new york city. Some argued that is very expensive and is not worth the taste of the food, the rest argued that the food here is affordable. All the authors also talked about the location and the decoration of the restaurants whether is fancy, cozy or had bad decoration. They also focused on the service that was offered and the food variations in restaurants, what influenced their menu and the chef’s style of cooking. What they also have in common is the audience they are trying to persuade. Their main audience was people living in new york and the secondary audience was people coming for a vacation in New York. What I have learned is that most of the restaurants in new york are just known for their luxurious environments and decoration but their food doesn’t taste good. Also, some people advertise and show healthy menus but in reality, their foods are not healthy, they focus more on the food tasting good but not the health benefits. I also saw some transitions in the text, most of the authors will start with positive comments or critics on the restaurants then end their articles with the negative critics. Some of the authors build their information on the negative critics and some also expands on the positive critic. Some also will start positively then give some negative critics in the body paragraph then conclude with strong positive comments that can overshadow the negative comments. They basically give two sides but expand more on the positive side. I want to know do people in new york city read these articles and use them whenever they go to restaurants or they just read the articles and go to restaurants without paying attention to details.

 

What i learned about myself as a writer is procrastination. Procrastination can prevent people from doing further research and finding more information. My strength is breaking down text, though my research i have realised that i can actually break down different texts and identify all the major components and ideas. I would like to do more research, read more articles and make real life connections to the text for better understanding. I need to work on procrastination and i can only improve if i don’t procrastinate. I also have to work on distraction and the materials that stop me from doing my work. Cell phones and social media can be a huge distraction to students. It can be very useful in terms of research but it can let students slack off or get off track when use regularly. My vocabulary was also improving and I was using all my resources for word definitions and general understanding. I normally skip over complex vocabulary but i was able to make good use of my resource this time. Lastly is self discipline, I have been following all my academic rules and regulations, meeting deadlines, working towards grades and making appointments with professors to discuss grades and how I can become a good student.

Jae Rose

Reflection

In my bibliography my genre was about hip-hop. In my bibliography I wrote about the artist who made statements about politics and what was going on in society. I wrote about this because I felt that these artist use there platform in a productive way by informing there audience expecially the young people about what’s going on and they should be aware.

While writing my bibliography I notice what all my sources had in common with each other. The First common thing my sources had was that the artist were all trying to inform and let there audience know about what’s going on in society and things we should be aware of. They informed us about things like police brutality racism and other major events that had happened over the past years. The second thing they all had in common was that the artist wasn’t afraid to speak up. They were all our voices to speak up against everything(politic wise). Using there platform to describe how they or we feel about different situations. For an example, for my source number 1 “Be Free” j.cole talks about the death of micheal brown who got shot by a police over selling cds and choke was the people voice speaking up on this horrible tragedy. The third  thing my sources had in common was that they had a unique type of tone. They all use a high tone so you can feel the energy and that u can get the message as well. For an example in source number 3, “I’m not a racist” Joyner Lucas is speaking as a Caucasian and a black African American. He raps with high and loud tone about race  and society and a heated discussion about race relations from the perspective of white men and black men. The last common thing my sources had in common was that they all share the same mixed emotion which is anger and sadness. They all share that they are tired of the same type of horrible events that goes on in the world either it’s to deal with police brutality, people killing each other over nonsense, or other horrible events that effect us. For an example in source number four “changes” Tupac talks about what goes on In the neighborhoods and also the police brutality. He influences his audience by just telling them don’t kill eachother and we should just love one another instead of being violent with one another.
After writhing my bibliography about politics I still want to learn more about different events involved with the politics that goes around the world. I feel like people listen mirr if it comes from music expecially if it from there favorite artist. The reason for me the learn more about this because it gives me (the audience) knowledge about what’s going on in the world. Just from writhing this bibliography I learned a lot about myself as a writer. As a writer we all have strengths and weaknesses. My weaknesses as a writer is that I make broad statements meaning I write a statement and never quite back up my statement. Another weakness I notice about my writing is that I don’t organize my thoughts correctly . I can be on one topic a jump to the next in the same paragraph. So that’s something I need to work on more. My strengths on writhing is that I have good punctuation and grammar and I can brain storm lots of ideas about a topic. To become a better writer I would need to do a couple of things just to improve and become better. I would need to read more books, articles, magazines, comic books and etc. From doing this I would improve my vocabulary and I can add big words to when I’m writing and not just plain simple words. Overall this bibliography assignment had benifit me because I gained  knowledge on how to improve my writing and also just being informed by my these talented artist about society/politics.

My genre was based on historical movies that portray significant events in history that made a big change in a specific place or to a large population. All sources shared concepts that the directors all wanted to demonstrate to the audience. In this genre, it’s taking an historical event and bringing it into a film to help the audience visualize the event that was a big part of history which is one thing all sources had, such as visual effects to create the imagery of what actually occurred during that time. Another thing was the effort made into the scripts, all directors and writers of the films read many historical books or researched any knowledge based on the event. If there were important figures, they are studied, to bring that person alive and to show the audience what that person was like in real life. All sources wanted the films to be accurate so then the audience not only enjoy the movie but also obtain more knowledge about the event and the impact it had on others in the past. In each film, directors use characters to connect more to the event, such as creating emotional appeals, so it is easier for the audience to compare themselves to that situation because the reason to have this particular genre is to put the audience in the movie and for them to get an understanding of what it was like, whether it was something terrible that had to be changed, a political issue in which people were affected, or an event that changed the way people lived. For all the films in the beginning, it’s more of an understanding of the background and throughout the movie, the characters get into complications that they go through in their own way and the audience sees that for each event, under different circumstances, people like them had to go through situations for a long period of time.

I learned that directors study for months about a specific event before trying to start filming, and writing the script can be stressful because of all the facts within the event that have to be accurate. Even watching the movies itself, I learned more about the historical time period. Another concept of making these kinds of genres is the fact that because historical movies are usually popular, directors try to demonstrate the negativity of the event to stop history from repeating itself. If there were movies based on politics, the negativity from the movie shows the audience what had happened before and how it impacted people, and the big picture to make sure our society does not end up in the same situation again. What I would still want to learn more is how directors put everything together, from all the knowledge about the historical event and the personal issues of the characters that are well put together, I like how historical movies are thought and planned out.

From this assignment I learned about writing more of an analysis, which happened to be a little difficult because I had to take different films and provide a well thought out explanation/analysis to describe how this particular movie connects with the idea of directors wanting to put a historical event into film and to demonstrate to the audience of the impact. It was a lot of explaining that I had to connect together to form a bigger analysis, which is something I never learned in high school. My strengths would have to be planning out first, having an outline to organize my ideas and format it as well as possible. In a way, I am aware of how to write an analysis in a correct way, writing specific parts for my paper was easy for me, when I’m able to get a clear idea of what I’m writing about I am able to explain myself without having difficulty. For the movies I had to find out what the main purpose was, what the outcome of the film that the directors wanted to portray was and connect to it the whole idea of the genre, what it’s purpose was, that format I had to keep for each source was something that was not difficult. I would like to learn more about the different types of writing there is, the annotated bibliography was new to me, but it opened my mind up and helped me learn how to connect my ideas together to get my main point out. After reading comments based on my paper, rewriting or fixing any analysis from any of my sources would be a good way of growing as a writer.

 

Tag “Reflection” category when posting

Reflection Assignment on Annotated Bibliography Prompt, due on Open Lab (500 words):

Your final portfolio will ask you to reflect on your evolution as a writer this semester. In this Open Lab post, you are doing two reflections (you can use this insight in your final portfolio reflection too):

1.Revisit the annotated bibliography you posted on Open Lab.
a. Now, imagine that you were teaching someone how to write in your genre. What are 4-5 things that all of the sources in your genre share? You could think about things like: the tone of the writers; ways that your sources open or close; whether they use emotional appeals or reason appeals more often; what audiences they are trying to persuade…
b. What did you learn about your topic? This could be anything, but you could also think about the norms or values that your writers and/or their audiences hold—how can you see those values working?
c. What do you still want to learn about your topic?

2.What did you learn about yourself as a writer through this assignment?
a. What do you think your strengths are as a writer? What are you good at? Please be specific and provide an example. (This could be any part of the writing process, including brainstorming and imagining.)
b. In what ways would you like to continue to grow as a writer?
c. How do you think you could enact those changes? What do you need in order to do so?