Reflective Essay

Throughout the semester, there have been many lessons learned through the English 328: Writing, Style and Technology course at Eastern Michigan University. The course was not set up as a traditional English class, meaning it was not limited to writing umpteen-million standard, five-paragraph essays on subjects that hardly varied. Instead, Professor Cassidy’s class was directly less on ingraining form into the students’ minds and more on how to write an affective paper. We looked at previous student papers on each of the subjects/projects that we were covering. These included assignments such as: Investigating Print and Online Journals, Analyzing a Text, The YouTube Project and Analyzing Issues and Informing Audiences. We were also responsible for reading articles that would prompt and stimulate discussion previous to or in conjunction with each project. English 328 was a truly effective course that taught and examined strategies for composing and assessing works, as well as structuring language.

As a class we learned to approach the composing process in several ways based on the actual writing at hand. For example, when we were required to write our Investigating Print and Online Journals paper we learned to read and discuss extremely studious material. We had to take heavy material and talk about the information offered in a serious tone in a very straight forward formatted essay. We also had to write an annotated bibliography page. But, when we moved to different subjects, particularly our Analyzing Issues and Informing Audiences project, we were taught to approach the writing process in a totally different way. To Analyze Issues and Inform Audiences we were pushed to talk about the subject in a much more informal way. First and second person narratives were encouraged and formatting and/or media were up for our choosing. We were also responsible for writing blogs, in which we yet again were forced to compose in a different way and for a different format.

The way in which we structured our language in each writing style also became significant. In other words, we learned to write in different ways in order to best approach the multitude of subjects at hand. Our YouTube project was a good example of practicing our language options. As we wrote our papers discussing the devices the video creators used, we were able to draw on the skills we learned in our Analyzing a Text paper and apply them to the new medium we were discussing. But, as we moved into the presentation part of the YouTube project, we were then forced to look at the same material in a different way. We had to then change and truncate our language choices from our papers, combine them with our partner’s, and figure out a way to present them to the audience within the given time frame.

The final function we really enhanced our skills in during English 328 was our assessment of texts. We looked over previous student papers and discussed them as a class, trying to learn to spot the things that worked or did not work in favor of the paper. We had to think about the audience that each paper was written for, and attempted to analyze whether or not the author had done a decent job explaining their subject for the appropriate audience. Sometimes the easiest way to do this was to simply play dumb, or more accurately, play ignorant, and act as though we did not understand anything unless it was clearly spelled out in each paper. We also participated in peer review days for most of our works in this class. When we participated in these reviews, we were able to work one-on-one with another student in the class and talk about our papers, what was working, what was unclear and what needed polishing in order to be final draft worthy. This gave us each a glimpse into the eyes of how an unrelated party would really view our essays, and was really helpful in that it allowed us to see where we were glazing over or avoiding details in what we were saying.

Composing, structuring and assessing are all valuable skills that were strengthened along the course of English 328. By looking at others works as well as our own, we were able to learn to be objective. By writing for different formats, from annotated bibliographies to free form informing projects, and by discussing so varied information, from professional journals to YouTube videos, we were able to learn to approach a variable subject in the most applicable way. These sorts of problem solving activities in the writing realm really helped to prepare for the real world of English.