Rhetorical Knowlege
The genre rewrite assignment, particularly the feedback that I got, taught me a lot about purpose and audience. While the assignment was incredibly fun and allowed for a huge amount of creativity, I forgot about audience while writing it. Mr. Salyers pointed out, in his feedback, that any person who reads my horror short story without any background knowledge about the actual book may be confused and not find the humor in my retelling. This assignment taught me to be careful and wary of who my audience is in the future.
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I think this exercise was important to understanding exactly how the rhetorical situation diagram works. We passed around a text of our choice to our group members and decided what each text's speaker, audience, subject, tone, medium, and purpose was. Some of my group members passed around pictures from Tumblr while I shared a t-shirt from my trip to Harvard University. It was a wonderful exercise to teach us about the different elements of rhetoric in different texts.
This is a screenshot taken from my daybook; we did this exercise in class on 8/27/14. |
Critical Reading/Thinking/Writing
In class, we were required to read the narratives of our group members and give critical feedback on both the good and bad aspects of the essays that we read. I had to be critical of both my own work and the work of others, which is difficult when you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. I also learned that it is extremely important to read both your own work and the work of others critically, because feedback and critical analysis is essential to the writing process.
This screenshot was taken from my daybook; the exercise was done on 9/12/14. |
Instead of spending time lecturing about grammar, Mr. Salyers decided to let the class, in groups, teach about different aspects of grammar and punctuation. My group had to teach the class about adverbs and adjectives. We worked well together and got everything done in a timely manner. As a group, we had to pool all of our resources and knowledge together to teach the class.
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Processes
The most drafts and planning that I have done for an assignment for ENGL 101 were for the first of our graded assignments: the "My Identity as a Writer" essay. While I do make at least two or three drafts for all of my writing assignments, I made four or five drafts for this one. Here, I've shown my earliest draft (which was really just a fleshed-out outline) and the last draft that I submitted. The essay changed drastically throughout the process.
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Also for the "My Identity" assignment, I was required to create a timeline of my journey as a writer. With this timeline, I could communicate not only with Mr. Salyers, but also with my entire class. Creating a timeline in Prezi enabled me to communicate with them much easier than I would have been able to if I would have only used my essay.
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Knowledge of Conventions
In this exercise, the class had to rewrite our favorite film as a poem. We had several standard poetry formats to choose from, including haiku, common meter, and sonnet. I chose to rewrite The Shining as a common meter poem. It was a fun exercise in medium that prepared the class for the Genre Rewrite assignment.
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I thoroughly enjoyed this assignment. Here, we had to take a news article about a man with ebola and turn it into a narrative about his experience. I wrote a first person short story about his struggle, describing his evasion, capture, and diagnosis. This article was very similar to the Genre Rewrite assignment, in my opinion, but also helpful when writing the narrative essay.
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Composing In Electronic Environments
ENGL 101 allows me to take notes, keep up with homework, and write with my WID prompts through my daybook. I use a digital daybook, which is created through OneNote. Because of this class, I also created a notebook for a few of my other classes. This is a simple and easy way to keep a notebook and keep it much more organized.
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On 9/29/14, we discussed the digital world and how we, as a society, view it. Our WID prompt ushered in a discussion about how media impacts our life. I feel like this prompt was very important, especially to this learning outcome. As students, we cannot fully embrace the benefits of technology in education without realizing the impact that it has on our daily lives.
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