This semester has taught me a lot about myself as an aspiring artist and a writer. To be an artist your work has a meaning and you should be able to explain your work and in that way art and writing aren’t that different from one another. Writing is just another form of art and expression. As a reader and writer I learned I can overcome many challenges such as this pandemic just by writing out my thoughts. Giving myself time to write allows me to clear my head and go over the emotions and helps me make sense of it all. As a writer I definitely changed and developed more to be able to voice my opinions. I normally have a lot of trouble conceptualizing problems and putting together solid persuasive arguments but this semester I decided to take my writing a step further and focus more time and energy into creating something I am proud of.

 One thing I definitely need to keep working on is my ability to start an assignment on time and stick with it until its completion. I normally have trouble with this because of procrastination but this semester I was able to push that aside despite the grooling pandemics troubles of online learning. I learned a lot from being in this class from the grammar mistakes to speaking outside of a genre I am comfortable with. I am very afraid of public speaking so I’ve never imagined I would have to construct an actual speech so that was scary. But all in all I was able to push through and write it anyways and that was a big step out of my comfort zone, I wasn’t expecting to have to make that so it took me by surprise and a lot of building myself up to write that. Although it wasn’t as hard as having to actually publicly speak it, it’s definitely a start. This course encouraged me to think about writing in a different genre in a completely new light. Normally when I thought about different genres I thought of romance, comedy, mystery, fantasy, etc. But now I see that it can be much more than that. In this class in the beginning I expected it to be more like a traditional english class where we read a full book and talked about it in class. Out the gate this semester was different because we never got to have face to face time with the teacher. Instead we did all of our work on OpenLab which was new for me since I’ve never done school online but it was a cool experience.

 If I had to advise a new student taking this course next semester I would tell them, to really read the Othello and Antigone play if they haven’t already or to watch an adaptation if they find it. Older plays still hold tons of historical value because of how beautifully it was crafted so I advise you guys definitely go and give those a watch and really think about the different issues that get discussed. I would also advise new students taking this course to relax and don’t let the pressures of online courses get to them, it really isn’t that much work to do if you just let your mind be in charge and you will fly through this course. 🙂