English 101, 2015

  

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.