ENGLISH 1010 ______________________________

Holly Workman

December 10, 2013 Brittany Stephensen Salt Lake Community College ENGL 1010 This semester I have completed three different types of essays which have helped to in many different ways prepare me for the college experience after being away for so many years. Each of these essays is completely different in style, content, execution and thought. The first essay in which we worked on was our Literacy Narrative. This first writing assignment was probably the easiest out of the three in terms of, not necessarily process as I revised so many times, but of creativity. I garner more towards the story than analytical so this was an area I excelled more in. My objective was to convey my experience as a writer in my past and how it has influenced my future and the direct impact it has had overall for me. This piece has also helped ease me back into the joys I have for writing and the thought process, editing and the many revisions that comes along with it. I had to think about how I wanted my audience ( to become engaged and respond to my piece and the best way to integrate my life experiences to how they have developed me into the type of writer I am today. However as I began writing, the story that emerged was not the one I originally intended to write which I have found is the way it works sometimes. After several revisions the story that developed was completely changed from my original intent and I believe came out better than it would have otherwise. I revised this over several times and found the term shitty first drafts apropos. This essay garnered a lot of reflection for me and required me to take a more analytical look at myself. My Rhetorical Analysis Essay on the Golden Compass was the most difficult piece for me. I had a difficult time dissecting as needed for the requirements of this essay and I do not feel as though it is my best work. Im not sure why but even after several meetings, including a last minute meeting with the tutor I still feel as if Im lost. I think I get it and then I go to write and I find myself questioning what Im supposed to be writing. When starting the assignment I didnt realize that I was supposed to pick one audience out of the many different ones addressed and so my interpretation made this more difficult in that aspect. If that had been a little clearer to me in the beginning as Ive never written a Rhetorical Analysis Essay I may not have been quite so overwhelmed. Well..I probably would still have been considering even after gathering that information I feel as though this essay failed miserably and was ineffective at delivering an appropriate analysis at a specific target audience. I re-wrote and went back to the original several times. I had a difficult time revising because I wasnt sure how to revise it necessarily. On the positive side I was able to learn more about picking apart something someone has written with this essay-even as ineffectual as I was at portraying it- and I still learned more than I knew beforehand.

The third and final essay within this course was our Issue Exploration Essay. I had quite a bit of fun, some computer frustrations, several aha! Moments all while learning a lot of information about a topic I was interested in. Not only did I learn about my topic on genetic engineering, but I learned a lot about writing as well. I have a hard time keeping my opinion out of what Im writing so I had to really be conscious to be objective prior to my conclusion. One of the most interesting things I learned about as it pertains to writing is MLA and APA. During my revisions I had to make sure to appropriately update my sources. I found that with some of the perspectives it was easier when I thought it would be hardest after review and the perspectives I imagined to be easiest were in fact the hardest. So I had to go back and add more information to expand on the perspective and decided to integrate more sources instead of going through those I already had. I found that with these sources I used more of the ones I came up with on my annotated bibliography than I did previously. For my revisions I found I didnt need to make as much of a change in specific sections-rather almost none at all-and add quite a bit in another to give more voice to the perspective I was writing about. This essay not only taught me about the structuring for this type of essay, but I learned more about research and taking pieces of information from multiple sources and keeping a neutral objective. This course has been astronomical in helping me to get back to the roots of writing and has helped me along in my others courses that Ive taken this semester. Those which Im sure I wouldnt have received the credits I did without the knowledge Ive obtained. It has been most helpful in my Psychology course and it has made me realize that though I was in a corporate job previously the writing which I had thought was good-could have been great. Sometimes all you need are the tools and this course has definitely helped me with those. For some it may just be an overview or a refresher course for things you already know, but for me as someone who has been out of the school game for quite some time and things were taught much differently this class has been instrumental in my progress as a writer and my ability to be successful in my other courses and I believe in my job. For example, my boyfriends 14 year old daughter knew what MLA citation was and here I am only just learning what the heck it is in my college writing course at 32 years old. Can you imagine my chagrin at hearing a 14 year old tell me what MLA is? Luckily for me it was commented upon after I learned about it during lab session. No, I dont have a problem at admitting this as it just goes to show how influential it has been in my development. I have had failures in this course, or rather high disappointments and I have had much success. However, I firmly believe that without these pitfalls I would never have succeeded and as a great inventor once said,
Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. Thomas A. Edison

I hope to continue to remember this quote by Thomas Edison when I am faced with hardships during my courses and to keep in mind that without failure you cannot succeed-and succeed I will because I will not give up. Best Regards, Holly Workman