Inquiry to my madness

Dear, Miss. Andrews.

 

Coming into this semester I expected to breeze through it but I was wrong. This course was rigorous and made me work for my grade. English is not my subject but I worked through the obstacles to make my writing better.

     

When I came into this class I knew I had a creative mind, but just didn’t know any tools to make my writing better. Throughout this course I have learned so much about the does and don’ts of a paper which really helped since I came from a high school whose English department was a joke. If you asked me what Ethos, Pathos, or Logos was I would have looked at you and asked if they were dead Greek philosophers. Now I can define them and identify forms of them easily. My writing as a whole is so much more organized and makes more sense than ever before.

 

At the beggining of the semester I came into this class I would just write a paper and hope it was good. Now I can easily navigate it and know how to do everything I need to. This class has helped me learn that revision is one of the most important parts of a paper. I learned from my fellow class mates their little tricks, and most of them worked. At the start of the class, my main goal was to be able to write a research paper that didn’t put people to sleep and now I can write about a topic and sound passionate about the topic and not like I am just rambling on. My next goal is to be able to apply my new writing skills to everything I do.

 

Coming into this class I knew that every research paper I had ever written was boring and half the time just didn’t make sense; on top of that I’m terrible with technology. Putting those two together for our inquiry project I knew would be interesting and I wanted to not be that girl who couldn’t work Wix, like Kendyl is. I practiced working with the website and got to the point that I was comfortable with it. Through all the papers we have written I have developed new ways of planning my papers, which you will see later on.

 

As I said before when I came into the class I had pretty much no sense of what an essay was supposed to be. Thankfully throughout this class we have worked on many little writing techniques that in the long run have helped me tremendously. I never thought about planning out on paper. Writing all my idea’s on a piece of paper, then choosing which one I like the best. With that then write what I know about the topic and what I need to know to be able to complete the assignment. This technique also helps me with planning and in what order to go in so I’m not jumping around like I used too. The main assignment that tested my new writing skills was my Inquiry Project. I slaved away all Easter break making sure I had every piece of background information, but since I didn’t agree with any online sources I had to write my own and form my own opinions. That one paper was like my pride and joy, and at the end I was so proud of the way it can out, even though a 2,000 word paper turned into 14,300 words. I know Miss. Andrews, you still want to slit my throat, but that’s okay!

 

Without peer responses I don’t think I would have survived this class, especially with all the out spoken people who weren’t afraid to tell me how it was. They caught all the mistakes I would just look over, and would let me know if any of it made sense. Every piece of advice I got helped, and in the end I came out with a great paper.

 

In the beginning of the semester if you would ask me what good writing was I would have given you a cookie cutter answer about grammar and content. Now if you ask me it’s all about your personal preference. I might not like a perfect paper about corn that has great technique and grammar, but since I hate corn, I would be biased. It all about that interests us for what we consider good writing. Like Adichie said about a single story.” If you only know one way, then that is the way you are going to believe. We cannot learn from one story, or two stories, we must learn from our own story”. That is something I am going to take with me for the rest of my life because it is so true, we all have to develop our own opinions and minds rather than going off someone else’s.

 

I know your probably wondering why my title of my blog is what it is, and that is because in this portfolio I'm letting you into my mind to see what really goes through it during these processes. This class has been a great learning experience and I have learned things that will help me not only within other classes, but also in the real world for example, navigating a website and designing it. I just want to take this time to thank you Miss. Andrews for being so understanding with my computer not working and sometimes having things just not go through. I enjoyed your class!