As the semester comes to an end there are many things to reflect on based on the assignments we were assigned in English 111. Some things to reflect on would be the monthly letters we had to write, writing summaries and short exercises in our journals, studying one or more of the assigned text as models for our own writing, planning drafting in writing our literacy narratives and textual analysis essays.
Composing letters and snail mail was something I put on the back burners and forgot to do a few times. Some days I would walk in class and everyone would have their envelopes and I would have nothing because I forgot to write my letter. This class really helped me stop procrastinating and making a planner of when everything is due.
We also used assigned texts as models for our own writing. Our campus read was educated. When we wrote our textual analysis essays we had to cite and quote everything that we used that was not something that we said. For example while riding the textual analysis paper I used quotes from educated as Tara Westover said. For my textual analysis I wrote about a chapter in the book that I enjoyed reading most. The chapter was chapter 4 of Educated and it was about when the Westovers got into an accident and while reading it I felt like I was a part of the accident too. A phrase from the chapter that was one of my favorites was when Audrey said “everyones here except Tara” This was not because she wasn’t in the car it was because she was thrown on the floor from the accident and the way that she explains it I could just picture her head being under the seat when the family was looking for everyone.
Another thing that we were required to do was turn away from the screen and focus solely on writing and getting work done and I noticed that I got more things done when I was not focused on my phone. Back in highschool it would take me days to write papers and now that I know how to put my phone up and just focus helps me get more things done in a shorter amount of time.
Another part of english 111 that I really enjoyed was making a blog and writing for an online audience. This was a way for me to set my writing at a higher standard because I always had the mindset that someone could actually read my work outside the classroom. This really made me look over my work more and fix little mistakes and pay close attention to detail.
I always looked forward to Fridays in class because those were wordplay days. This was a time for us not to stress about school work and play scrabble. This helped me not to stress about other classes and put my mind at ease a little bit. This was also a way of expanding my vocabulary and having to critically think whenever there were not really any letters to make words out of. This course really helped me out in a lot of ways and I learned things in this class that I will use in my future and also in my career. Even though my time in class was cut short I still made friends out of the class and would recommend my teacher to anyone that has to take this class in the future. Overall this was not a hard class and I have never really been a fan of english until I made it to college.
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