Midterm Reflection

1. Graphical representation of your writing/composing process

I'm very basic when it comes to planning.

2. A reflective cover letter that addresses how you are meeting the following student learning outcomes completed to date:

-modes of blogging and informal writing: academic, political/community-based, and personal

-situating your writing: Analyzing, synthesizing, and composing with sources

composing processes: argument and persuasion

-multimedia: visual analysis and composition, aural analysis and composition

-collaborative, coordinated, or distributed writing: linking, interacting, and responding in writing to/with peers.

-writing in the disciplines: connecting your writing to research and scholarship in a specific field

Community Writing (outside of academia)

This cover letter should directly address our 4 primary modes of evaluation: rhetorical knowledge, critical thinking/reading/writing, process, and knowledge of conventions. The following questions are meant to be heuristic to help get you thinking in a reflective mode:

           Before this class, I was never interested in writing. I'm somewhat of a stubborn student when it comes to writing because I don't like being forced to write about topics that I'm uninterested in. This class broadened my horizons with topics on what to write about. Using the wiki was something I had to get used to, but already having some knowledge with html and computers made the wiki easy and enjoyable. Typing is something that is a lot more common now than writing anyways, so it's nice to have a class that is more into the new. Blogging was never a thing that I've done in class before, it was usually a thing that I did as a journal when I had something that happened in my life that I wanted to remember. I enjoyed writing about topics that affected the world that people don't often write about in class.. such as politics and world problems. It makes me feel like debating when I blog about things that could be fixed if people knew more about it. I'd want to write about more persuasing topics instead of boring topics. I've learned that more interesting topics of writing attract more of audience to read what you have written. The purpose of writing is so that others can read what's written and sometimes even absorb the information.  I need a lot more work on my writing structure though, I know how to structure I just need to discipline myself more on planning my writing before I jumble paragraphs up together. This class kept me interested, I decided what to focus on when I find out the topic of what I am writing easily because I had more motivation to write on the topic. I judge what's the most and least important to write about when I think about if what I'm writing would catch someone else's attention. Peer editing has helped me, hearing what others think on my writing gets me to write better because I know what other's would want to hear more. I think that I have a problem with putting my own thoughts into what I'm writing about. If I'm writing an explanatory paper I tend to use my biased opinions rather than broadening to other ideas. I've become more critical thinker, reader, and writer due to the peer editing that I had to do as well because I felt like a teacher grading another person's writing. When researching a topic, I used online sources more-so than any book. Wikipedia is such a useful resource, it could be false information but you can check up information on other websites just to be sure. Videos make writing a lot easier and the visual can attract more of an audience than just writing.  Overall this class has helped my writing skills because I've used a whole new form of writing than I've been used to and I now prefer writing with the commons and writing with my thoughts/interests.

Rhetorical Knowledge

Audience: What have you learned about addressing an audience in _____ writing? Write something that will catch an audiences attention. First you should decide what type of audience will be reading your piece.

Purpose: What have you learned about the purposes of ___ writing? To entertain, give knowledge, vent, and so on! Writing is a way to get the word out about anything.

Rhetorical Situation: How did the writing context affect your ____ text? I loved being able to write about anything really, mostly all of the topics we were given were interesting enough. My problem wasn't really writing, it was more of what I was going to write about though. How did your choice of topic affect the research you conducted and how you presented your exploration to your readers? It wasn't hard to research because being able to choose a topic made researching easy because I knew where to look already.

Voice and Tone: How would you describe your voice in this project? Free Your tone? Easy-going. How do they contribute to the effectiveness of your essay? It flows :]

Context, Medium, and Genre: How did your context determine the medium and genre you chose, and how did those decisions affect your writing?

Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing

Learning/ Inquiry: How did you decide what to focus on in your writing? Describe the process you went through to focus on a main idea, or thesis. How did you judge what was most and least important in your exploratory writing?

Responsibility: How did you fulfill your responsibilities to your readers?

Reading and Research: What research did you conduct? How sufficient was the research you did? Why? What additional research might you have done?

Overall: As a result of writing this _________, how have you become a more critical thinker, reader, and writer? What critical thinking, reading, and writing skills do you hope to develop further in your next writing project? How will you work on them?

Composing Processes

Invention: What invention strategies were most useful to you? Why?

Organizing Your Ideas and Details: What organization strategies have you used and learned? How successful was have they been?

Revising: What one revision did you make that you are most satisfied with? What are the strongest and the weakest parts of the paper or other piece of writing you wrote for this chapter? Why? If you could go back and make an additional revision, what would it be?

Working with Peers: How did your instructor or peer readers help you by making comments and suggestions about your writing? List some examples of useful comments that you received. List some examples of how you revised your exploration based on those comments and suggestions. How could you have made better use of the comments and suggestions you received? How could your peer readers help you more on your next assignment? How might you help them more, in the future, with the comments and suggestions you make on their texts?

Graphic, Visual, & Digital Composing: If you used photographs or other visuals to help present your exploration to readers, what did you learn about incorporating these elements?

Becoming a Writer: What writerly habits have you developed, modified, or improved on as you constructed the assignments for this class? How will you change your future writing activities, based on what you have learned about yourself?

Conventions

Editing: What sentence-level problems did you find most frequently in your writing? How will you avoid that problem in future assignments?

Genre: What conventions of the genre, if any, gave you problems?

Documentation: If you used sources for your paper, what documentation style did you use? What problems, if any, did you have with it?

Writing Technologies

Think about the ways that you have used digital technologies over the course of the semester. What technologies are you using to facilitate the act of writing? How are you using them? What have been the benefits and drawbacks of the writing technologies you use specific to the rhetorical situation you have used them in?

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