Ezra DeVane Part 1

My journey in my first-year words class has been one for the history books. Coming off a stellar

senior year where I finished with a 4.3 grade point average and an A plus in AP English Language and

Composition, I did not believe there much that entry level writing class could teach me. While I do feel

like the two classes are terribly similar, I do believe this one went a lot more in depth with our

objectives, which in turn made me a better writer. Through experiencing different lectures, assignments,

and projects, I feel like I was able to fulfill and succeed in our five SLO’s.

I believe critical reading was a subject that we implemented throughout the whole semester.

Before we did any writing, it was always something we had to read first. It varied from Mark Twain

learning his discourse, to people dying facing internal and external battles, to literary fallacies.

Everything that was read, however, had deep analytical properties, and the questions we had prompted

us to read at a deeper level. On top of this, in every class we would talk about what we read and make

sure everyone was on the same page. This helped tremendously with getting us used to a variety of texts

and being able to dissect them academically.

The readings we were doing were not only for this purpose, however. With these readings, we

applied things to our own lives. For example, after reading about Twain and how his teacher Bixby

helped or harmed the process of learning his trade, we got to write about our best or worse teacher and

practice how to sufficiently back this up with evidence. Sticking with twain, we walked through the

whole process of him learning his discourse, and then we were able to do the same thing write about

our process learning something we enjoy. This helped us with our composing processes due to having to

make our own literary works. It also helped us with our knowledge of convention because we not only

had to make it supported and full, but also, we had to make sure we take factors such as linguistic

structure, plagiarism, and formatting with our writing.

 With this writing we were doing, we were also allowed to participate in critical reflections. Every

time we wrote a big paper, we were always assigned a partner to look over our rough drafts. This

allowed us to not only use the rhetorical awareness we acquired to see the flaws in our peers' writing,

but also sharpen our skills by getting feedback on the things we possibly missed from others to learn

from moving forward. This helped us with our collaborative skills while showing us that reflection is a

necessary part of what we do as thinkers.