Reflective Statement

Reflective Statement

At first, I thought that this class would be a repeat of every other English class that I have taken in the past. Many English classes I've been through in high school have turned the very complex subject of writing into a mathematic equation. It introduces essays and writing as formulaic equations with little to no room for creative expression and creation. It is mere mindless typing consisting of pre-generated formats of intros, body paragraphs, and conclusions. Because of this writing was a subject that never really interested me in high school, instead made me groan in disappointment and despair. This class though changed that outlook, from the very first assignment.

When we began the explanation for the first project I remember the moment where I knew things in this class would be much different right at the beginning. My professor Ayo, was explaining and people kept asking the same questions. “How many body paragraphs should be in the essay?” “How long should each paragraph be?” “What should I write about?”. They asked the same questions over and over again and the professor always answered in ways that broke their expectations. “There can be as many body paragraphs as you wish” “They can be as long as you want them to be” and “You can write about whatever you wish”. This was the first and probably the biggest thing I learned from this entire class, writing isn't scripted. You can control what you write, what message you want to spread, and how you want to write it. Every single person had the opportunity to come up with their own prompt and research topic. This surprisingly was probably the hardest part about the whole first project. Typically we are given a prompt and we have to come up with what to write about. But this is where I think education in writing falters. It's difficult to write about something you aren't passionate about, when we are given a topic, the biggest challenge is finding motivation and writing about the subject from the heart. In this research project, once I found something that I was genuinely interested in, despite the project being one of the longest projects I've written, it truly did go by very quickly and easily due to it being something I was genuinely passionate about and interested in.

For the second project a similar thing occurred, we were tasked with writing a rhetorical analysis. This task seemed boring at first, but once the class realized that we could analyze literally any piece of media we could possibly imagine as long as it fits into the context of our research. This was amazing and made analyzing the pieces so much easier. I genuinely got to dive into a really interesting piece of media and thinking about something I was interested in that context while writing about it all was a great experience. I feel like I changed my mind significantly during the entirety of the analysis about my stance and beliefs on the matter and many other matters. Analyzing a piece that deeply gave me new perspectives on many matters.

The final project did an amazing job of tying every bit of everything I had experienced back together. After doing my own personal research on a particular matter and then proceeding to see other people's analysis of that same rhetoric I got to bring it all together and write my own two cents on everything I gathered through whatever genres I wanted. It was great to explore genre conventions and what it takes to create pieces with the idea of spreading a particular rhetoric in mind. This whole class felt like an experience and I'm extremely grateful for it.

    On this website, I have attached all my work from this class and two additional movie reviews I have written as a result of this class.