Going into this ENGL 1A class I never had high hopes of a good grade and I was never a good writer. I would never had taken this class if it was not a requirement to transfer. During the first week of class, Professor Weidner gave us a brief outline of the course and what to expect from assignments. I thought this class was going to be the most stressful of all my classes as it requires lots of reading, writing and research and I never liked any of those 3 demands. However, as I am writing this I have approached the end of the course and I believe my writing skills have improved drastically and that I believe I can get an A in this course.
The one constant about this class is the amount of reading I had to do. When we were voting for the class book, Lost Connections was only 5th on my vote because depression was never something that interests me. Professor Weidner makes us read approximately 60 pages over the weekend. Being a slow reader and hated reading, I believed it was too much. Despite that, I decided to put in the effort and read 8-10 pages a day while highlighting important quotations for my reading responses. In the end I actually enjoyed the book and even recommend it to my friends. Sometimes I felt that I could just read it for the rest of the day. Reading the books and texts along with picking out quotations improved my critical thinking skills of interpreting meanings of the texts.
Writing research papers have also been a new challenge in college. College research papers are so much different than what I was used to in high school. Research assignments at college level required citations which was something that I have never done before. This made me attend the tutoring sessions with Megan before class on Thursdays to learn about MLA citations which definitely helped me to get a better understanding about citations. In class I learned about the basic structure of a college research paper as it requires a thesis in the introduction to ‘setup’ the rest of the paper. I also learned about the TEAL paragraph format which was useful when writing arguments to support the main thesis of my research papers. I learned how to include quotes by giving credit to the author in my paper to avoid plagiarism. Professor Weidner also introduced many different genres of writing such as blog posts, op-eds and white papers. These genres all had a different audience and required different tone and language when writing. Throughout the semester, I have only been writing blog post genres as it is the genre I am most comfortable with. Because the final project required 2 or more different genres, this challenged myself to constantly adapt to a new style of writing different genres. As practice makes perfect, I now can write articles for different audiences and with a different tone in it.
Writing these genres can be challenging but researching and picking a topic can be just as challenging. All this time, I thought that I just had to pick a topic, do some research and start writing about it. However this class has taught me that it is the incorrect way of doing it. The research process that I learned from this class was that I should pick a topic that is not too broad or narrow of a topic. Then I had to research articles whether there is enough information for me to write about it and expand or narrow your topic based on the amount of research you can find. The articles cannot be just any articles but the have to be scholarly articles which are written by recognized experts in their fields of study. The reliability of the website can be determined by the CRAAP test.
The new research process choosing a topic and researching was not easy because there could be so many ideas to talk about. I struggled to conduct research with this process as I got an incomplete for my first research paper. The paper required revision. I completed revisions by re-reading my paper to check for any plagiarism and restructuring my sentences to have a clear argument to support the main thesis. I also had to make sure that I have a clear and concise thesis at the beginning of the paper. By making these small changes, my paper was acceptable to college standards.
For the future, I plan to take ENGL 1C next spring and transfer to UC. This class has definitely gave me the perfect foundation to succeed in spring as this class has taught me the structure of writing paragraphs in many genres of essays, how to cite good sources through the CRAAP test and the structure and requirements to write a college level essay and research paper. As for my career, I plan to major in Mechanical Engineering and writing is still required in my future career as I have to write reports very often. Lab reports requires me to write in a specific structure and this class and style of writing has also developed my writing skills to be organized and clearly structured.
From having hopes of passing to now feeling like I can get an A. Overall, I believe I should get an A in this class because my writing skills before this course and now is virtually night and day. Another reason why I should get an A is because I have fulfilled every term in the grading contract to get an A. I have missed one minor reading response and I have completed all major coursework with 2 of them having done advanced work by posting my articles on medium.
Mt Sac ENGL 1A 