Michael Samudio
English

                                          Reflection

At the start of the semester, I came in expecting to do a lot of reading and writing, and not really sure what I would learn, considering that most of the things in English classes are not really information that is generally new to me. But I found myself learning a lot about the importance of knowing your audience. I believe that what changed in my writing over the course of the semester, is how I write in order to accommodate an audience I am trying to aim at. It changes the way you write and talk about things significantly, because you need to properly reach out towards a certain group of people in order to gain the most effect out of your writing. I believe this was the most significant thing I have picked up, and I would be able to transfer it to practically any medium.  

One of the first lessons we went over was discourse course communities. I had never heard of this concept before, so I thought it was very interesting being able to link what I knew about people within communities to a real term. I was able to analyze how I fit under the umbrella of discourse communities, and better understand the psychology behind how and why people act or behave a certain way around certain people. In my Project 1, I wrote about the discourse community I considered myself to be a part of, and it got me thinking about how naturally we preserve styles of language and jargon for these communities, and not use them when outside of them. We are a part of more discourse communities than you think. Being a student, resident of a certain region, or ethnic background even count as some, but it’s usually in our subconscious. I made a revision to this project to add a quote from Amy Tan, Mother tongue.

Project 2 was a lot more involved when it came to research, I learned a lot about the topic of Genetic modification, and I thought that the OpEd was a great way to hone in the skills that come with debating one side of an argument. From my experience I had my research on the topic done already from another assignment I had from another class, so I carried it over to this assignment. Initially it was too similar to a speech-like format, so I had to revise it in order to give it a more OpEd structural feel, by moving words around and removing some unnecessary sentences. But overall it was very informative and I had fun doing the necessary research, since it was a topic I was interested in. 

Project 3 was interesting, because I had to adapt my project 2 into a new medium. Initially I planned to make it into a video, but considering the style of my writing and research, I didn’t know how to present it in a way that wouldn’t be me reading off of it like a script, and adding some visuals to accompany it. I felt that doing that would not be the intended purpose of the assignment, on top of it being more time consuming than my other options, so I bailed on that idea and decided to make an infographic. An infographic was a much better idea in my opinion because it goes hand and hand with facts/information, which was what most of my project was about. When I first turned it in, it was on canva but the default post, so it was essentially a sideshow. I realized that this was not how an infographic was supposed to look like, so I revised it and reconstructed it into an infographic format. I had a tricky time finding sentences to cut out, and re-wording my text so that I can properly convey my information without it being too lengthy and consuming too much space on the infographic. Proper word choice and sentence structure was important, and it was awkward for me to work around, considering that in English, typically writing more and being descriptive is a good thing, so I wasn’t used to this. But overall I think it turned out well, besides the fact that I wasn’t able to remove the caps lock on my text, due to the font I chose which did not give me the option to do so. 

Seeing others make posts for their assignments was helpful for me because it allowed me to view an example of how mine should look like, or give me ideas on how to structure my assignment. But I also felt a little nervous about showing my assignment publicly. My first 2 projects were private, but I made my 3rd project public. Another thing that was helpful was the feedback/comments we received. It gave me another perspective, and great suggestions on how to improve my project. We did not have any late penalties for these projects, which was very interesting, and not something I was exactly used to, but I was very grateful for it. I procrastinate a lot admittedly, so I felt like this took off a lot of the pressure that comes with due dates, however I think it enabled me to have more of a reason to procrastinate, which I kind of did. My work habits didn’t really change, but I did not feel pressured on any assignment, so I was relaxed, and acknowledged that I could afford to be flexible when it came to it.

I did not have any difficulties myself, and I thought the course was paced very well and we were able to get through what we needed to do with a lot of time given. But to wrap up, advice I would give to future students, is to not be shy to ask for help or for clarification on anything. You were very open for questions and wanted to guide and push us into the direction we needed to head to get things done reasonably. As for the instructor, I don’t have much advice, I think you were great but if I had to say, I’d say assign some work or writing work to do in class every now and then, especially related to a project that has been assigned around that time, so we can get into the groove of things and the right mindset, although I am grateful for not getting much classwork myself lol.