I definitely learned a lot about my preferred writing style from these assignments. I found out that I really liked the ones that required my perspectives and opinions, like the open letter and the literacy narrative. My most effective piece of writing was the open letter because I used tangible evidence to support my claim that would appeal to broad audiences. The most entertaining for me to write was the observation blog because I got to use my imagination to justify why the people I saw acted the way they acted.
I feel like the format of writing a blog has been so much more fun to both read and write than a paper would be. I can put so much more of my personality into everything that I write. My favorite of the multimodal assignments was the visual essay blog. I got to dig through the internet and all of my pictures to find the perfect representation of myself. This helped my overall understanding of audience because it helps separate the target audience away from "academia" and more towards the community.
My writing has definitely improved over the semester, thanks to our writing assignments. I have OCD and I am a pretty big control freak, and these assignments have allowed me to become more comfortable with letting things go and writing whatever comes to my mind whether it is perfect or not. I feel like the freewrites helped the most with that, specifically the one where we had to keep typing for five minutes straight. I just used this technique earlier this week to write my Political Theory essay. It helped me get all of my ideas out on paper before going back and writing my real essay.
The Villa Park HS workshops were very hard to do over zoom. My group in particular had lots of audio issues and we had to communicate through the chat solely. I could tell that a lot of the people in my group were not paying attention when we did that, and would respond very little if at all. Additionally, my partner and I were the only ones to have our cameras on during all of our meetings. I feel like the meetings were somewhat valuable for both Chapman and the high school students, but it really missed the mark with the connection aspect with one another. The meeting that we had in person was the best one out of all of them because the students were really involved in the conversations we were having. I'm not sure if I would volunteer with high school students again necessarily, but I would love to volunteer again after this.
This semester I've learned that I am actually a better writer than I thought. I went through all honors and AP English classes throughout my high school career learning a specific format on how to write. It was boring, frustrating, and made writing not as fun anymore. I would get super self-conscious about my writing, so being in this positive environment actually getting to write about things that I want to write about is refreshing. I think that the literacy narrative was the first place that I saw this take action.
My workload this semester has definitely been a lot more than I'm used to. I took 6 particularly time-consuming classes, and I don't think I was emotionally prepared to go for it. The excitement of being in person again last semester wore out around finals last semester, and after the busyness of the holidays, I went straight into my really difficult interterm class, and then the spring semester started where I got super burnt out right before midterms. I feel like I've just been barely hanging on since. I don't think that coming back in person necessarily was that hard for me besides my social battery running out way faster than it used to.
Comments