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Blaine Majors

Ms. Brooke

ENGL 1302

15th April 2021

Advanced College Rhetoric Retrospective

I have now completed English 1302 and it has been a very useful class to say the least. I

have learned so much about my writing style and ways how to write. I have improved upon

many skills but, the four main skills I have improved upon are; identifying stakeholders and

their standpoints on issues of public concern, and identifying, explaining, and analyzing the

values informing those standpoints; summarizing, paraphrasing, analyzing, and synthesizing

information from a variety of sources in my writing; evaluating the work of others, giving useful

feedback to others on their writing, and evaluating and incorporating feedback from others in

my own writing; and applying citation conventions appropriate for genre, purpose, and

audience.

In the overall project of this course we have to find many stakeholders. Before I started

this class I did not know what a stakeholder even was. In this whole course one of the very first

assignments was to evaluate and identify five stakeholders that relate to your project. To

identify stakeholders I had to find out which groups were affected by this. I also learned what

silent stakeholders were. This was a good realization because I never have thought about them

in this manner. This also helped me analyze the way these stakeholders were thinking.

In Project three, there was an annotated bibliography assignment. I have to find ten

sources, varying from secondary to primary, and analyze each one. This really helped me
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because before this I was having a lot of trouble finding reliable sources. In this project I had to

paraphrase and summarize each one. This also really helped me learn what the difference was

between summarizing, paraphrasing, analyzing, and synthesizing. I learned how to find a variety

of sources as well.

I have done plenty of peer writing in the previous english courses I took. In high school

we would do peer review with no meaning. In my first semester of college I did peer review but

did not truly think about how to apply it back to my work. In this semester I have seen mistakes

in other people's work and then applied back to my own. There were some common mistakes

among my peers and I had to go back to my work and check if I had those same mistakes.

Applying citations in my work has always been something I struggled with and is still

something I struggle with. I have definitely gotten better on it though. We have been working

on citations the whole semester. In all of the projects we have had to do this semester I have

had to use quotations during my work. I also learned how to apply my citation in text. This is

one skill I plan to use in my future here at Texas Tech University. I am a music education major

and one of the core classes we have to take are music history classes. In these classes we have

to write many essays and reports. Learning about in text citation really helps utilize it in the

music history essays. I will definitely utilize this in my future years at Texas Tech University.