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AJ Stockwell

Professor Wolcott

ENC 1102

27 April 2015

Final Reflection

Coming into ENC 1102 from ENC 1101 was somewhat intimidating. I felt as though I

was challenged during ENC 1101 and my professor told us that 1102 was going to be more

difficult and have more research. Research has never been a strong point of my academics, so

this worried me. However, after the class started and it was revealed that we would be able to

write about a topic of our choosing, I got more optimistic. I have never been a part of a class

where the students got to guide their own learning. So, I figured I would start my final reflection

by stating my support of the way the class was run overall. I found it to be very enjoyable and

very informative at the same time which, in my opinion, does not happen often. I learned a lot of

valuable skills this semester, most of which I will be able to apply throughout the rest of my

writing career and even any future jobs I may have.

The first unit that we covered this semester revolved around the literacy narrative paper. I

feel as though I grasped the concepts of this unit well and I was able to show that in my final

paper. One of the major concepts was sponsors, which is anyone or anything that helps or

hinders a person’s pursuit of literacy. Another concept that we discussed was materiality. I found

this one to be difficult to understand at the time we discussed it, but now I think that I have

wrapped my head around it. I believe that materiality talks about the actual material things that

help or hinder our literacy. Some examples of this would be things like books or the computer

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lab that the school provides. Although I had never written a literacy narrative, it did feel similar

to other types of writing I had done in school before. This unit also helped ease my nerves about

ENC 1102 being much more difficult than ENC 1101.

The second major assignment we did was the genre analysis. Not only was most of this

information completely new to me, I had also never written a genre analysis before. During this

unit I thought almost everything was difficult. I was able to understand the readings that we had

done, but when I tried to apply it back to the topic that I chose, it got much more difficult. One of

my main takeaways from this unit was that genre is almost always used incorrectly. Most people

use it to sort things like music into categories. During this semester I learned that genre is

actually something that comes about because of a repeated rhetorical situation. The example of

this that I understood best was the syllabus. Teachers probably answered the same questions year

after year so someone decided to write it down and just give it to the students to read instead.

This makes things easier for everyone involved. I also learned that the features of a genre can

give hints about its purposes and the rhetorical situation that it is a response to. This will be a

helpful skill later in life because whenever I encounter a new type of genre that I haven’t seen, I

will be able to analyze it and make an educated guess about what its purpose is.

The third major assignment we did was by far the newest to me. I had only ever heard of

an annotated bibliography once before when my roommate was doing his during the fall

semester. I knew what annotations were and I knew what a bibliography was, but I had no idea

how the two could be put together. After learning what an annotated bibliography is and making

my own, I realized that they are in a way fun to write. Also, as we learned in class, writing

annotated bibliographies could even be a career in itself. When doing this assignment I learned

new strategies for doing research which will be very helpful in the future. As college goes on, I

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will definitely have to do more research, and this assignment taught me things that I would not

have known about otherwise. I did face some difficulties during this assignment in choosing an

audience to write for. Originally I thought that my audience could be anyone who wanted to read

my paper, but then I realized that because of my limited knowledge of my topic, I had to choose

an audience that was new to hedge funds as well. In my case, I decided on my audience being

people who are either new to hedge funds or interested in learning a little bit about them, like

myself.

The final piece of writing we did for this class was the literature review. The literature

review is another type of writing that I had no previous experience with. I think the literature

review taught me an interesting skill by making me take ideas from other people and putting

them together to create my own ideas. For example, taking the ideas from all the articles that I

had found and finding an area that could use some more research. “Contributing to the

conversation” is something that we talked about a lot in this class, but it really made the most

sense to me in this assignment. Since none of this research was really my own, my goal was to

take what others were already talking about and contribute my own take on it. To do so I had to

learn to identify the conversation within a discourse community and the most effective way to

contribute my ideas to it. Before this class, I never would have thought I was capable of doing

something like that, especially with such advanced articles and subject matter.

One major theme of this semester was revision. Not only editing your paper for spelling

and grammar mistakes, but also going back and reforming your ideas if needed. I learned a lot

about myself as a writer in ENC 1101, but even more so in ENC 1102. Something that was a

common theme in almost all of my revisions for the major assignments was that I rarely take

things out of a draft. In my opinion, this is because the way I like to write is to sit down and

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finish my piece of writing in one sitting, so deleting anything would be like going backwards.

Another common theme that I noticed was that I don’t change the ideas in my papers often. If I

do anything, it’s usually changing how I worded my ideas instead of revising the idea as a whole.

This is not necessarily a good thing because sometimes my ideas do need to be completely

revised and it becomes very difficult for me. From this semester I definitely learned that I need to

be more open minded as a writer. By this I mean that I need to be more willing to do global

revision and not just local revisions.

I believe that I deserve an A on this portfolio. I think that I have covered all the

requirements and done them in a way that shows how much I have grown throughout this

semester and everything that I have learned. Although my actual drafts did not have much

revision, I think that I showed my ability to revise by going back and saying what I would do if I

were to revise each paper again. I gave an honest assessment of what I thought of myself as a

writer during this semester, including the things I struggled with and those I found easy. Finally,

in this reflection letter I believe that I have shown everything that I have learned in each unit of

the class, along with revision as a whole. Overall, I am happy with this portfolio and I think that

it portrays my learning and progress in the class as well as anything else that I could create.