I signed up for English 101 with a
bit of a preconceived notion of what it would be like. I’ve never really liked
writing much and I imagined writing boring papers about things I wasn’t
interested in and thought I would hate the class. On the first day though, this
idea changed and I had some hope for the class to be not as horrible as I had
previously thought. I liked that this class focused more on the critical
thinking part of writing instead of the usual grammatical, technical aspect
that generally accompanies academic writing.
Throughout this quarter, this class
has really made clear what “joining the conversation” looks like and how the
overall process of writing comes together. I also feel more comfortable with
the peer response process than I did before. In my presentation essay and the
work leading up to the final piece, I feel that I have demonstrated my
understanding of both the conversational tone that we have learned about in
this course and also the process of rewriting and revising that we have also
focused on a lot this quarter.
I started out with my first essay
about interconnection and how the blogging world may be changing the way we as
a society read, and although my presentation essay contains a very small amount
of the same ideas that were in the first essay, some of them were passed onto
my second essay. One of the things I really liked about my first essay was the
idea of us all being connected and an idea of everyone being changed by things
other people do, so that was what I brought into my second essay. In my second
essay, I felt like I did a really good job of keeping a conversational tone and
cutting out biased words that might alienate some readers. I didn’t like
centering my writing around blogs, so for the second essay I used Andrew
Sullivan’s “Why I Blog” a little less and focused more on what genre meant from
Paul Heilker’s view point and how that affected things. One of the things that
really helped me with this essay was the hypothesis-question-hypothesis CIP we
did in preparation. I felt like this was a very good way to both use ideas from
before while also bringing in new twists. The idea of looking at genre in a
different sense really drew me in and I was more excited to write about it.
This is why I thought the ideas in my second essay were a lot more developed
than my first, only to be brought down by a lack of evidence from the texts.
After the second essay I started thinking a lot about the ideas proposed by all
the texts we had read about people become who they are and how that connects
with writing, and became interested in how they could come together in a larger
sense. I took my third, presentation essay more bigger picture. I used my first
two essays as learning experiences for my presentation essay, so that when I
finally did have the final draft it is has all the best parts of the first two
and also new ideas. Nancy Sommers says,
“it is always the writer’s voice, vision and argument that create the new
source” and that is what I tried to do with my final essay, using the
conversational tone that we talked about in class and my own take on the idea
of genre to combine both Sommers, Heilker and Sullivan and converse with the
sources to make my own source. One thing that I really lacked confidence in on
my first couple essays where the citation packages. I had trouble with citing
them correctly and also using them to back up my claims, so this was something
I really worked on when writing my final essay. Also, reading Stuart Greene’s
essay on inquiry in writing helped me to understand what critical inquiry
questions where along with how to “converse” better with the sources.
Before this class I had only ever
been told that I needed to prove something with my writing, essays with strict
guidelines on how they were supposed to be structured and written, so for me,
the way we wrote in English 101 was a breath of fresh air. I have never liked
having a thesis and proving it because it leaves nothing to the reader and also
limits the audience. Having a CIQ opens the paper up so that it is more than
one sided and in the end would make a more valid case, because all angles have
been looked at thoroughly. With a thesis based paper, I think that the writer
is set up to only look at one angle of an argument, or discussion and once this
idea has formed, is hard to not just look at essays like this. I myself had a
hard time adjusting just this quarter to actually discussing a topic rather than
arguing it. With a more holistic view of a topic, I think it’s easier to write
a paper that better serves the purpose of it and also the audience.
I chose to present my portfolio in
the form of an online network. I chose to do it online to both mirror the
interconnectivity Sullivan talks about in his essay and because part of it is
also in blog form, also bring in the ideas of Sullivan. The main part of my
work is on a blog, then linked to a Pinterest board. The reason I chose to do
this was because Pinterest is something I like so I was trying to bring in some
of my own touch (having not loved blogging in the past or in this course) and
also because of the conversational feel Pinterest has. On the pictures (pinned
onto Pinterest) anyone can comment which gives the freedom to converse easily
with people you have never even met. If you have never used Pinterest before,
there are different “boards” on a profile, like pages that all have a similar
thing, usually like “hair” or “food”. The pinner then can either post or “pin” pictures
on boards from an outside source or re-pin something they find and like from
someone else’s board. If you click on a pin, it will direct you to the original
source that it was gotten. Because of this, each board consists of pins from
many different people, all in one place to create its own feel or genre, while
also being a place that other people can visit and converse on. This for me was
a logical way to bring together the ideas of Heilker and Sullivan.
With my board that I created for my
portfolio, called “A Way of Being in the World”, I pinned quotes from authors
we read and ones I thought had to do with my presentation essay topic, pictures
that all had a feel to them that I wanted for the page and also pictures from
my blog “Joining the Conversation” so that if you click on the picture it will
take you to the blog. I really like the fact that this layout joins both the
Internet and the conversational tone and feel that it has with Heilker’s more
abstract definition of genre. Sommers’s ideas come into my portfolio mainly
through my presentation essay in which I used her piece as the main source
supporting evidence, along with Heilker and in the quotes and pictures I pinned
on the Pinterest board. I chose the titles of my blog to me more similar to
Sullivan’s idea of conversing on the Internet and I picked the board title to
reflect more of Heilker’s ideas, in that I wanted the pins on my board to
create one feel or genre of being in the world.
Prospective:
I took a creative writing class in
high school my senior year that I hoped would be a less structured way to write
in an academic setting. By the end of the year I was very discouraged by the
fact that I felt less confident in my writing, and didn’t even feel like trying
anymore. I think this was due to the fact that it was a very structured class.
Although not liking the way the
English 101 curriculum was set up this quarter with our final grade only based
off of work we are doing at the very tail end of the quarter, I did appreciate
the fact that I feel more confident in my writing now. Some of the things we
talked about in class and worked on in our writing like the authoritative I and
the revision process, I understand a lot more now and are part of the reason I
feel more comfortable in my writing now.
The way we wrote in this class was
not only a style of writing, but also an idea that I have seen taught
throughout me life. In my high school chemistry class, our teacher stressed the
fact that we needed to ask questions and come to conclusions based on what we
knew and could see, not just assume things. I think can be very applicable to
different situations, even apart from just writing. Looking at all the facts of a situation and
thinking a little more deeply on it I think is a valuable lesson to take away
from this class and also a way of thinking I personally can bring into my
future classes, and just generally in my life.