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Ronald Djonko

Prof. Gordon

English 1301 CRN 21923

09 May 2022

My First Semester in a Writing Class

Even in one’s own country, living in society is a permanent learning process that requires

a lot of effort and sacrifice. Growing up, every individual must learn the language, the culture,

the laws and be confronted with the realities of the environment in which he finds himself,

factors which can vary from one region to another in the same country. The same procedure is

necessary when an individual changes country; he must adapt to an unfamiliar environment,

language, culture, in short, a new way of life. This adaptation begins with learning the language

of the country in which one has moved. In my case, my first year of learning English more

precisely how to write It properly was interesting to say the least due to different activities such

as on campus and virtual meetings, class discussions, journal writing and review samples on

canvas and Turnitin which made this experience fun and enjoyable.

My first semester was marked by the discovery of a new way of taking lessons: It is

virtual, thanks to a platform called Cisco Webex. Due to the pandemic, I had to take my classes

for two weeks on Webex and it was to my surprise interesting. Attending the course from home

is cool, especially on a platform easy to handle like Webex. The great advantage of this form of

meeting is the recording of the sessions, each session was recorded, and these recordings were

accessible to all, thus giving everyone the opportunity to listen to the entire course again or just

parts that were not understood. It also gave those who miss a session the chance to catch up at a
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time that suits them. After those two weeks, we went back to a more conventional way of taking

classes.

Despite the emergence of innovative technologies which open the door to new ways of

learning, in particular through virtual meetings, taking lessons in person in a classroom remains

for many the best way to learn. Personally, I prefer to take face to face classes and this semester,

my first at college, taking the ENGLISH 1301 course on campus has been beneficial to me. Even

if at first the teacher seemed to me severe, it turned out that she was genuinely nice and

explained the different writing processes very well; her lessons were simple and practical which

made it easy to assimilate. Also, the fact that she was an approachable person pushed me to ask

questions after class, thus allowing me to erase the few grew areas that I may have had

throughout the semester. These meetings on campus were marked by various discussions

beneficial to all.

The various discussions we had in class played a significant role in my learning on how

to create a good essay. Exchanging ideas and opinions is a wonderful way to learn, and I have

experienced it on this course. Building paragraphs together both students and teacher allowed me

to broaden my knowledge on the subject and gave me new ideas. I was very often inspired by the

way the teacher and/or my classmates thought about and approached the various subjects to write

my assignments. These discussions led to the creation of many samples that were especially

useful in other class activities.

Out of all the activities and resources that we had, the review samples on canvas and

Turnitin were surely the most valuable ones for me. Being a person with a strong logical/

mathematical intelligence, l learn most from examples: I needed to see and identify the different

pattern of each of my writing assignments to understand what I must do. So, those samples were
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for me like a compass, a guide that allowed me to never deviate from the topic to be discussed.

All the time and at each step of each paragraph, I would refer to it to make sure I did not forget

anything, that I followed all the instructions and met all the requirements for each assignment.

Writing journals is one of those activities in which these samples have proven to be unbelievably

valuable.

Writing journals was the essential activity of my learning process this semester. This

activity consisted of creating a word document adhering to MLA standards, writing two to three

paragraphs while respecting all the key components and creating at the end a page where the

various sources of information used in those paragraphs were cited. We had to do four journals

this semester, thus allowing me by repeating the same process to retain and master all the key

components of an argumentative paragraph in an essay and learning how to present a document

in MLA format. In short, thanks to this activity I was able to become a passable even if my

English still seems approximate.

I really enjoyed my first semester in a writing class because of its diverse activities. The

rhetorical analysis of a song activity was one of the interesting that we had because the different

rhetorical strategies (Logos, Ethos, Pathos) were all new and unfamiliar concepts to me. I was

particularly surprised to learn through this assignment that these strategies were commonly used

by artists in their songs to touch the heart of their audience. Taking a composition I course is

highly effective for college students because from then on, they will be repeatedly asked to

demonstrate their knowledge through essays, hence the importance of knowing how to write

properly. The only activity that I found useless in this course was the Prezi presentation because

it’s was embarrassing to me to stand in front of complete strangers and talk about yourself,

especially since I admit not having understood the academic interest.