Starting ENC 1102, I was not looking forward to any of the work that was listed on the blog page. There were a number of assignments that looked completely pointless and worthless to even bother doing. However throughout the semester, I saw how passionate my instructor was in helping students write their research papers. Professor Longhany allowed us to choose our own topic and go about it however we saw fit. The assignments that were given helped me in my writing process and I am grateful that he pushed us to do the best that we can.
Completing this course, I found that I can now locate different discourse communities, genres, inquiries and more. It didn't seem important to locate them before I started the course, but now that I have gone through this course, I realize that locating these different communities can help me start a new argument/voice that could extend further off the topic. When I had to read the passages that Professor addressed the class to read, I was able to actively look for different communities when he was teaching us about it in class. This helped my research process improve immensely because it allowed me to find new arguments and find information that I needed for my research concisely and efficiently through credible sources such as academic journals. I was then taught how to infer and analyze the information that I found and incorporate that into my research paper, where I used that information to create a new argument from my evidence that I gathered. In one of my sources, I found psychological, language, and stress arguments, which I used to create my research topic. I was finally taught what concision really meant after all these years of deleting and cropping out important information to create a "concise" paper. Now I see that concision is used to crop out words that are repetitive or rhetorical and completely useless fluff in an essay that don't hold an important value place. I also found that creating drafts all throughout the course made my writing because it allowed me to organize my thoughts ahead of time and allowed me the chance to write better. Before, I never wrote drafts because I thought they were useless. After completing this course, I found how essential it is because it showed me how I went from one set of incomplete unorganized thinking to a more clear and easy flowing essay. The Literature Review helped me write all of my thoughts together and efficiently by the different topic headings and the previous drafts of work such as the Intertextual Map and the Annotated Bibliography helped me organize into them into my work well.
I believe having the opportunity to choose the topic makes writing the paper ten times easier and more interesting because then it doesn't seem like homework that has a deadline, but more of fun time research! My analyzing/inference skills and overall research skills has improved immensely compared to the beginning of the course because I can carry this knowledge onto a new research paper. My writing skills have improved now that I understand what concision is too. I enjoyed this course and all the skills that I have learned to become a better writer and researcher!
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