Ramirez 1

David Ramirez

Emily Litle

ENG 122-001

9 December 2017

ENG 121 Reflection

Who am I now that I wasnt four months ago? I am a fairly better writer today than I was

when I started my first semester class of English 121. English 121 taught me a few more things

than my last English class one year ago. Although in my mind a lot of what I learned was pretty

much review of what I learned in high school, this class helped me sharpen my knowledge about

writing and built over that foundation of thought. It has been a short four and a half months or so

but I have five artifacts that helped me refine my writing ability. My first is an assignment based

on understanding MLA Citation. After that I talk about a poem, discussion, my second class

paper, and finally the glue that kept most of it together my lazy notes, aka the white board

pictures.

MLA Citation, if youre an average college student you probably think its a useless

obstacle for writing a paper or essay, if youre a professor with many peer reviewed journals

under your name you probably think citation is necessary for protecting copyright. I fall into the

third category of dont care buddy, smiley face. So, when I had to learn how to get the

fundamental part of institutional writing correct, I made sure to be as correct as possible.

Although I have a whatever dude feeling with citations I understand its important to that

intuitional side of writing. And all I can say about the MLA citation sheet in specifics is that it

helped me understand how to site my sources, for the most part.

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I love poems. To bad we didnt get to make any. But I guess the next best thing is to

analyze slam poems. My second artifact is a project that involved being put into groups to

observe and analyze slam poems shown to us. Each group was given a specific poem, and a

poem the whole class would look into. From this activity I got a better understanding of how

others interpret writing, and in doing so how writing isnt always a black and white world. There

is always context to everything, and a difference of opinion in most literature. And I believe that

might have been the point of English classes of the past teaching literature. Understanding

literature and interpretation is an important skill that translates to the world heavily outside of the

academic world. These poems on their subject matter familiar to my demographic helped me

understand said subject matter more when I heard a difference of opinion from a peer, and doing

so also reminded me to use such hindsight into other topics.

I am a very opinionated person, and when the time comes to share thoughts with the class

I tend not to shy away. Even when Ms. Litle tasks us to speak of controversial topics such as

rape in my third artifact I still have one thought or another. From what I learned about this

activity was how to speak on controversial topics in a tactful and insightful way. And much like

the poem activity, I found the value in seeing someone elses opinion on a topic. I found that

nuance was an important part of understanding why something exists and how to move forward

regard the area of interest. In the case of this assignment we looked into the details of a specific

government protection policy and how that influences culture in terms of people. It gave haste to

another realization that certain definitions can be of hinderance and of unforeseen consequence.

It is important to see what a person is really saying versus what their writing is saying, because

these two things may not always be the same, even law makers make mistakes like these.
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Discourse community, Something I would be hesitant to discourse on again. Lucky for

me I wont be opening the can of worms brought to me by intellectual John Swales. Instead I

will give tidings on what I had done regarding my fourth artifact, the Discourse community

paper. In writing this paper I used the structure given to me by my teacher. That structure going

as follows; Thesis, explanation, analysis and explanation and analysis again until I got to my

conclusion leaving me with about seven paragraphs of a paper. Understanding how to write a

paper rather than what to write on a paper was drastic for me. Although my approach to writing a

paper is at a drawn-out pace, I have a well-structured paper at the very least. I believe I did very

well on the final draft version of this paper and some of the markings done it reflect some of my

strong features in writing. This artifact is less of what I learned from it and more of what I did

with my prior knowledge to contribute to this paper. In my fifth and last artifact I go into the

detail about what helped me write this paper and my strategy.

They say take a picture, it will last longer. When it came to learning and my own

slothfulness to take notes I took the joke phrase to thought and utilized my phones ability to take

pictures. My fifth artifact is part of a collection of photos I had taken over my first semester a

OJC. These photos in particular are those of the white board in my ENG 121 classroom. The

details from each picture gave me critical details on how to tackle the current assignment. The

very first photo was how I got the structure on how to write my second paper of the class. I

would highly recommend to any student to take photos of the white board when valuable

information is present. Doing so helped me very well get through the English class and every

assignment and paper.

So how do I conclude this reflection of the last four and half months? I told you about my

precious artifacts. Even dusted them in display for thou presence. Ill be real for this last part
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then. English 121 was a class I had, and may be the last English class I will ever take in my life

considering my career option. Its faintly disturbing to me, but at the very least Im glad to have

pick up some valuable techniques for the rest of my adult life. Thank you my teacher Emily

Litle.