Arvanitis 1 Emily Arvanitis Mr.

Borrero ENGL 1101 December 5, 2012 Final Reflection At the beginning of this semester I kind of thought this class would be like my high school English class- a breeze. I quickly figured out that that was all wrong and this English class was not going to be easy. Not that I minded a new challenge, because I really do like English, I just wasnt accurate about the amount of things Id have to do. As the semester went on though, I began to like the course and had a lot of fun and thoroughly enjoyed the first project. Up until the ethnography this was my favorite class. That quickly changed after the Squatchers video. When I figured out we didnt watch that just for fun, I started to not like the class anymore. When the second project came up I thought the research part of it but I didnt understand what the point of writing an ethnography was at all. Not only did my opinion of the class as a whole change, but my opinion on literacy changed also. I never really thought about how I learned to read and write and how nearly everything in my life affects the way I read, write, and speak. During the Literacy Experience account project I learned a lot about how the way I speak really is unique to Boston and there are certain customs and words said in my family that I also say. I also never realized how heavily certain people and Walden Pond have impacted the way I write and how I get my thoughts out. I didnt even know that a place could be a literacy sponsor, but because of that project I realized that my biggest one is in fact a place.

Arvanitis 2 Before this class I never really cared or thought about good writing. I kind of just read things and if I didnt like them I would stop reading. When I was first asked what good writing was though, my response was something along the lines of writing that is interesting to the reader. This opinion really hasnt changed because I feel like no matter what my classmates said, the answer always came back to something in the same regard as my opinion. Im not mad about it though. At the beginning of the course I had the mind set that I was going to be an all star in this class and get good grades. It wasnt that I became lazy and forgot about that goal, things just got harder than I expected, faster than I expected. With regards to the literacy account, I could have done a much better job on the final draft, but I was having such difficulty wrapping my head around it because I kept doing it at places I couldnt focus well. This type of choice set me up for my own failure, even though it didnt come out too miserable, I know it could have been better. The choices I made for the ethnography were way better though. I did so much research and really did work hard on that one, until it came time to the rough draft. I kept loosing focus on what the point I was trying to get across was, thats why I chose to revise that because I feel like it was worse than my first one. I chose a pretty strange topic for the ethnography. Im not sure why I wanted to challenge myself even more than I already do with this course, but I did and honestly, I gained a lot out of it. I was glad to have picked that topic because it opened my mind to a lot of other people and different kinds of writing and how to tell what a good source is and a bad source and what not. The everyday journals we did I really enjoyed though. They were simple prompts but they really made my brain think about things I never

Arvanitis 3 would have thought about. I think they were all good ways to start the class and the questions themselves were on point. They impacted the way I write because when we discussed them with the class my opinion was opened to different things to write about and even different perspectives to think about things from. When looking over my portfolio I realized that my research paper was actually pretty formal and didnt have much of a sarcastic tone to it like most of my writing is. Not in a condescending way though, thats just the way I talk and part of my literacy history. Ive definitely made my work more thorough and did a lot of research than I did in the beginning. When I was first introduced to first and second drafts in this class, I told myself I would do them because I usually dont ever, I just make outlines. That didnt change. I did make more in depth outlines though; it was really easy to make paragraphs from the guidelines I made myself. As far as risk taking goes, with the second project its pretty safe to say that I did in fact put myself out there and took a huge risk with my topic. It didnt bring in as many weaknesses as it could have though because I was really determined to make it good and work hard at it. Until the final draft began to crumble. But that happens I guess. A huge weakness I do have though is, is I dont really check over my work and thoroughly revise it, I kind of just skim over and change one or two things. I tried to work on that but I never saw a point in reading what I wrote because I already know whats there so I just got easily distracted. As whole, aside from the second project, I really do think this course helped improve my writing and thinking. The second project, I thought, just had no relevance to anything. I liked the portfolio and I thought I was a good way to keep

Arvanitis 4 track of all our work for the year. This English 1101 class taught me to think outside the box, but not too much. And that there are some things you just have to do and do well, no matter how much they wont affect your life in any way whatsoever.