On the very first day the quarter began I entered my Eng.
271 class thinking that the class would be another boring one out of many. In fact
I had prepared my mind that the course will be a dry one. Then, after the
exchange of introductions we were informed that the syllabus revolves around
blog postings and online writing. At that moment I thought, “This is going to
be one of the most interesting classes this quarter.” I was really happy to
learn that we will be looking over something which is really common these days
and most of the students need to learn about online writing and related stuff.
Our very first assignment about the Wikipedia article helped
me a lot in knowing how people actually write online and how you can find the
exact same information in so many sites. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of Wikipedia
or anything, but I had never looked at it that way. In fact, until then I had
used Wikipedia for research purposes that too pretty rarely because I had always
thought of it as a less reliable source than others. In this class I learned a lot
of new things about Wikipedia and how it works.
I am so not a news person. I don’t like watching news or
reading newspapers which is the reason why I am least updated about current
affairs. Well, the assignments like
rewriting the news and incorporating voice in expository writing turned out to
be of great help. Not only did I learn about the tactics for writing news but
also they made me look up for current news’s and issues. Some of the news’s
were so surprising; like making clothes from milk, that I was glad we were assigned
to do the ‘rewriting the news’ task. Also, integrating voice in expository gave
me ideas on how a topic or article can totally take a new turn by incorporating
voice. I also learned when and where one should use his /her own voice in order
to make the article sound unbiased.
We also wrote definition essays, process essays, and
classification essays. Those too I found pretty much useful as they were of a
great help in improving the organization of writing. These essays also helped
in transitioning well from one line/paragraph to another. Again, all three of
them apart from improving my writing skills, increased my knowledge about
certain things. The process essay benefited me in knowing how to incorporate a detailed
process in your article and how can each step be explained well enough to the
reader. Similarly, classification essay gave the idea on how to concentrate at
just a few sub topics/categories of one wide or vast category.
The best thing about this class was the peer reviews on
regular basis. I got to know the whole class and point of views of almost all
of the students on my writing. In my opinion peer reviews are a must for a
writing class because they help a lot in improving the writing skills. It can
happen one might not come up with an idea or point which is a ‘must-have’ in
your article, however your peer did. All the ideas and opinions from my peers
helped me a lot in making my writing portfolio better. Also, one of the most
important things that learnt towards the end of my class was about the visuals
and how they can or cannot help in improving your text. I had always thought
that incorporating pictures may help the reader understand better but never
thought they might be a source of distraction too. This class helped me in
understanding the proper usage of visuals; how much should be used in one article.
Overall, this class turned out to be really interesting. In
each class I was able to learn something new which in turn helped me in
improving my writing skills. I am glad that I got a chance to learn a whole lot
about expository writing along with peer reviews on regular basis which
eventually helped me thinking in a broader way and look into many aspects of a article
than focusing on few.
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