Welcome to my final reflection for English 1010 this semester!
The focus of my final project was
to shape my words into something that truly reflects what I as the author want. Many times, the
meaning is lost within the wording of a piece, so I strove to make it as clear as I could while still
expressing myself in the way I am most comfortable. “Final” is such a strong word in the sense that it
typically means the last version of something. In a way, yes, these will be the last project I will be doing
for this particular class, but it won’t be the last writing I every do. So, while this is my final project, I feel
it is more of a “until the next piece” project. Throughout the journey of the new experiences and writing
styles, I’ve been exposed to a lot of different opinions and biases that changed my view and certain
subjects. As an example, research is more important to me now than it was at the beginning of the
school year as through my conversations, it was easy to tell who knew what they were talking about and
who was just spewing random facts.
The Food Narrative and Memoir was the first assignment that made me really think hard about
my goals. Most of the time with writing assignments, you can have the same generic goals and translate
them through many mediums; my goal is to keep the reader engaged, my goal is to write so many pages,
or write so beautifully the heavens break open and God himself delivers the A grade for my paper. Let
me be honest, my one goal was to write an emotional paper without getting too “TMI” for my audience.
Drafting took a heck-of-a-lot out of me, and I took some short-cuts I know I shouldn’t have, but the
paper is still intact so all's well that ends well I suppose. The process for writing a draft for me is just
writing all the ideas out on paper, regardless of the order or sense. After the slaughtering of my
keyboard, I go back and rearrange the paragraphs to make decent sense and then finally reread one
more time to fix punctuation and sending it in to be graded. Revision wise you can see I only went back
through and fixed some ideas to help the narrative flow better. A lot of the editing is just rearranging
sentences, so they weren’t as wordy as before and making them conceptually accurate. While it may
seem like little work was done, so much was done to make it less noticeable of the mistakes that existed
in the first place.
I believe everyone struggled with the Rhetorical analysis as the themes of logos, pathos, and
ethos were a concept not touched upon by our previous teachers. This piece has undergone so many
surgeries that it must look like some Frankenstein hybrid of the original paper. My goals for the rhetoric
were to understand the difference between pathos, logos, and ethos but that didn’t go as well as I
wanted it to go. As for revisions, my first time I just rearranged two of the paragraphs and switched the
wording around a bit and tried to pass it off as a new piece. That didn’t work to well and my grade
showed for it. So, on this last attempt, I went through and made sure I had done my citations as well as
fix the grammar and awkward wording in the second and third paragraphs. While still on the wordier
side, the analysis was fun and entertaining to go through.
And finally we have the Civil Engagement Project. The Magnum Opus, if you will, of my works.
For this one, we were allowed to venture outside the safety net of picking a food-related topic and
choose whatever we wanted. I was genuinely surprised at what my fellow students had picked for their
project and I received the same reaction back at me. My original project was a children’s book talking
about a little boy named Sam who goes to school and has a small adventure talking about jobs with his
classmate. His father is a janitor, and some other students give him flak for it. But, in the end they
apologize for being close minded and everything is all good. I rewrote the script for that darn book at
least eight times until I took a walk around my block several times and came back to it after two days.
For my Final Project though, I adapted the children’s book into a simple photo essay featuring the main
character Sam as he is falling into a sort of panic attack. My goal for both aspects of the project was to
share how I felt in a similar situation I had as a child. Through both the book and the essay, I feel like
Sam is the perfect embodiment of how I felt all those years ago.
Learning buffets are short writing assignments paired with an activity relating to food. The
activity itself ranges from actually going out into the world and interacting with others while the other
range deals with more personal and in depth reflects about your opinions or thoughts on food. They
were the best and worst thing I have experienced through this semester. On one hand you have the
amazing experiences and new ideas you get from traveling around and interacting with different people.
On the other hand, it felt like if you close your eyes for three second the project would be due the
following day which left no time to plan or sign up for anything. I tried to force myself out of my comfort
zone and try actively going out of my way to try new things, but they fell through a lot of the time. I
ended up doing the more in depth, thinking buffets. That doesn’t change the value in any way, I was
really happy with the products I got out in the end. Deadlines have been a huge trial for me during the
Learning Buffets and many times I would be scrambling to finish them on the Sunday morning they were
due. Don’t get me wrong, I have the assignment done and everything is thought out, but I just have
other things pop up, so the writing portion of the learning buffet gets pushed to the last possible
moment.
One of the skills that I felt most strongly about when I entered this course was my ability to add
details to the works, I am writing. This still proves very true, but I have learning to pull in the reigns on
myself as I like to get carried away on side information that doesn’t have real significance to the main
plot. I just want the readers to understand my thinking process, but a lot of the time my mental process
looks like the New York Subway system. Another large challenge for me has been overthinking every
piece I’ve completed. I always find myself immediately going to deep levels of doubt as I press the turn
in button on an assignment. I know the work is good and I will have my peers look over it and give me
tips on how to improve; somehow, I always fall into the same self-deprecating cycle. Through branching
out though, I have learned to trust myself more and to just let go of the worry once I turn in the paper.
There is nothing else I can do past that point, so why waste energy worrying about something out of my
control? A final technique I learned is to read my pieces aloud. This has been a life saver and I highly
recommend it to anyone who is unable to give their piece to someone else to look over. By reading what
I wrote, I spotted much more mistakes than I would have by just simply reading the text line by line. By
jumping around and reading the different segments individually, I was able to mold the words to fit my
original ideas much more easily. All-in-all, I am grateful I took this class, and I will look to see how far I’ll
go if I take classes with similar concepts behind them.
