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Cassandra Blandford
UWRT 1102
February 26, 2015
Midterm Reflection
When I first came into UWRT 1102, I thought it was going to be
pretty similar to the previous UWRT 1101 class I took fall semester. On
our first day of class in here , when we first got theat packet on our
Extended Inquiry Project., I had no clue what some of the things in it
were. Then when the teacher told us to choose a topic and think of an
open-ended question about our topic I immediately started
brainstorming about things I would like to write about in this class. In
my mind I immediately thought about two topics I wanted to write
about. One was the topic I chose which was tattoos but and the other
one I had also thought about werewas about kids who have beenwere
adopted. I chose to base my extended Inquiry Project on tattoos
because I had already done the topic of adopted children for my UWRT
1101 portfolio. I like choosing topics I can deeply relate to; being
because I was adopted I chose to do the adopted children topic and
since I have tattoos I chose to do the topic of tattoos. I felt that I
should expand my writing topics and choosing something different I
had never expressed my feelings onabout.

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When I officially chose my topic, thinking about my inquiry
question was my next concern. Tattoos can be a very broad topic and I
didnt really know where to exactly start. Since tattoos are becoming a
lot more popular, Ive been seeing a lot more people in the working
class with themI have seen a lot of my classmates have tattoos and
this tells me that tattoos are becoming more popular. I wondered with
this dramatic physical change in the American Worker, how are the
managers of huge companies choosing their employees nowadays?.
Also being a college freshman, although I have three years left of
school, my next big step in life is to get a career in the major field I
choose. and yetThis topic concerns me because I have five tattoos.
What really helped me was when we proposed our rough question to
the class and got some feedback on our rough draft question. I got a
lot of good places where I could start approaching my question from
many different directions. My final question ended up being, How and
why are tattoos perceived in the workplace?
The first thing we had to do after we had come up with our
inquiry question was to write a proposal about why we had chosen that
specific topic. We were to state what we already knew about our topic,
places where we could find information and why we personally chose
the topic. Writing my proposal seemed pretty easy because I got to
express my views on my topic. Although I came off biased, I stated in
my proposal that I was going to search for both sides of my topic both

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good and bad, views from the worker and the employer. I feared that I
was going to be too biased but after researching a little I found that I
could find both positive and negative sides on the topic.
When we turned in a rough draft for our proposal we had a peer
review group to sort of test the waters with our classmates and search
for improvement on our approach about our topic. Doing the peer
review I believed helped a lot of kids even me. Talking with my
classmates helped me breakdown the awkwardness wall we all have in
a new class with new people. Even when I read my proposal out loud to
my peer review group I noticed some mistakes on my own paper and
discussed how I could improve my paper with my group. I think it got
us all talking and none of us were really scared about expressing our
opinion. These group reviews helped me because I wouldnt have gone
back and wrote an edited version if I didnt talk to anyone because I
didnt think it needed much editing.
After the proposal was turned in, we were onto the next step of
our Extended Inquiry Project, which was the Annotated Bibliography.
The first time we talked about it in class, I had never heard or seen the
word before. Abut after hearing what it actually was it reminded me of
something we did back in UWRT 1101. Although it wasnt the exact
same, it was pretty similar and I wasnt too nervous about it. When we
started talking about it, we had to find five sources to analyze and
discuss why we chose that source for our topic. We also had to state

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how we knew it was a credible reliable source. Luckily I had found five
sources pretty easily.
When my class took the trip to the library, I wasnt too confident
that Id find a book on my topic or even close to it. When we learned
where to search and what key words to use when searching I didnt
have any luck on finding any books in the library. So I searched on a
common search engine, Google to be exact, and found plenty of
articles about that growing tattoo population. While I was searching I
decided that although even though I didnt find any legitimate books in
the libraries databasey, maybe they would have some online articles I
could look at. Turns out they had one that I had previously found and
decided to use for researching my topic topic. which Finding this on the
libraries database helped me decide if that article was reliable or not. I
thought the library was helpful because it gave me some free time to
search the Internet for some sources that I later on used in my
Annotated Bibliography.
After finding all five sources we had to have for our Annotated
Bibliography, we wrote a rough draft then brought it in to class where
we got into groups for a peer review. In our second peer review we
were a little more experienced in expressing our feelings towards each
other and springing out new ideas for each otherto help each other
improve our writing skills.