Beginning with unit one, I must say, I thought this was an exciting first project when we were told about it. I have always been a fan of writing small articles. Throughout high school I was in journalism and went to IHSA sectionals and state for writing articles, so this was something I was very familiar with. Although this was something that I was used to writing, and knew what I was doing, I still encountered a problem that I had to find a solution to. I had trouble with the person I had planned on interviewing, though I was able to work through this and it had become an accomplishment. Looking back on my first blog for this unit, I mentioned that my goal was to successfully create a "good" article on my topic. Now, I believe that I did reach my goal, along with finding out other successes. Feedback totally opened my eyes. Before, "feedback" was always known to me, as correcting grammar and pretty much making sure that it followed that 5 paragraph essay rule. Now, I have come to learn that it is much more than that. It is looking into the paper, finding the meaning and reasoning, and focusing on it's parts and it's sense. I was actually surprised to to hear for Nicole not to even pay attention to the grammar issues, that we are looking for more than that. This feedback and analysis process was something I used throughout the entire rest of the semester.
On to unit two, we had to create a juxtaposition piece. Not only that, but as a group project. I haven't always been too fond of group projects, not to mention I had no idea what the whole concept of the project was! Soon enough I found out that we would be working with different genres, such as sidewalk chalk, diary entries, and/or even post it notes. Learning that the language of each one of those all had their own characteristics certainly amazed me. I loved how we broke apart and analyzed each of the genres and looked into what would happen if we broke a certain criteria of the genre. This later on helped me with my theatre class paper. We had to look into and write about the elements of theatre. I dissected each of the elements and then broke one. It totally changed how a theatre play would go, or what the reaction would be if one of those elements were missing. As you can see, this unit helped me not only for this class, but for another as well. As for the group part of this, it ended very successful.
Finally, unit three was a bit like unit one, in my opinion, but in a more professional, scholarly way. This article was a bit more difficult for me. I figured that I would just create what I could for the rough draft, and then go from there. The individual meeting with Nicole helped a lot. I found that I just need to expand more on my writing. I do agree, and feel that I learned greatly from that. Once again we worked with peers and got feedback, which like I said before, is one of the most important things to me now. In the end, I was happy with what I created. I got to focus on one thing, blogs, which I had just found out about in the beginning of the semester, so in a way I got to reflect on my learning process, which was very interesting.
To conclude, overall I have learned an outstanding amount, not only about standard english but that there is so much more to it than what was maybe learned in high school. I feel that we expanded a lot in this class and that we worked with stuff that I hadn't even heard of before. I consider all of this a learning process since I constantly was learning and finding new ideas every day. Another thing, that there are no set standards to writing and creating a piece. There are so many types of genres and each have their own set of criteria. Setting up and creating a rubric is a great way to find each of these criteria. Those are just a few things that I learned throughout this semester. It makes me want to stay and find even more that I did ever know about. I feel this has been a very successful course for me. This will all be carried with me the remaining time of my college career and life as well.
As a final note, something that I found very interesting is the way that my first blog looks compared to my final one. As we know, there is no set way to create a blog post, though I feel like I found a "correct" way for me to write one. My first was just one huge paragraph rambling on, and now looking, I have multiple paragraphs, each time, I am expanding my ideas and writing even more.
