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Haley Furguson
Professor Olivia Rines
UWRT 1101-02
25 February 2015
Midterm Reflection
During my semester in Writing and Inquiry in Academic Contexts I, I have learned a lot.
Whether it is learning about the different forms of literacy and the elements of those, or just
improving my writing in general. A lot of what has improved for me is learning how to respond
to peers writing and how to receive critique from peer review. I really enjoyed having this
incorporated into the semester; it allows me to see the opinions of other writers and readers. I
think the whole concept of peer response really strengthened my writing.
Pulling off from the idea of responding to peers writing is the discussion forum that we
post in about once or twice a week. As straining as this forum can be it really helps with
improving my writing. The forum allows me to respond to a certain literature and practice
supporting my claims with examples of the reading. I have always had trouble with supporting
my claims or forgetting to incorporate them into my writing, whereas this assignment that we
have really aids me into making it a habit. I also enjoy sharing my opinion, it is harder for me to
speak in class and give my opinion and the forum allows me to share my opinion in my writing.
A lot of the writing in college includes the opinion of your own (argumentative papers) and the
forum is another way to practice reflecting my opinion in writing. For example, our last forum
post on Coaches Can Read Too allowed me to share my opinion on how Barick wrote his
Ethnographic study and also let me reflect on how I will write my paper. It also showed me an

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example of a project that I will complete soon and I think that was really helpful for my
understanding.
During the semester so far, I have spent a good amount of time writing and revising my
papers. It usually takes me a while to write a paper because I like to revise while I am in the
process of writing. For our Genre Analysis that was due, I spent about three hours just
researching for it. I think that finding sources that will both reflect my opinion and support it is
very important, and finding these resources usually takes a while, especially for such a precise
topic such as commercials as a genre. After finding my resources and my corpus, it took me
about four to five hours to write the first draft. It is hard for me to sit down and just write a paper,
so I usually plan it out first and attempt to stay on track by having an outline and fixing my errors
as I write. For revising my paper after peer workshop, it probably took me about an hour or two.
I really tried to put into consideration of the two peer reviews when revising my paper, which
took up more time because they both had different ideas and suggestions. Overall in paper
writing process, I probably spent around nine hours out of class building the paper, not including
final revisions. I also spend around an hour or so for every forum that is due.
Throughout this course I have put a lot of effort towards assigned writings. I make sure to
spend a fair amount of time for each assignment due and I make sure to think through each
assignment considerably. The genre analysis is the largest example of my hard efforts for this
class. I had worked my hardest and longest on the genre analysis, making it one of my most
productive efforts. I have worked diligently on every piece that was assigned this semester, but
depending on how much I understand or how interested I am is how productive I will be when
completing the assignment. I think that on some forums, the readings we have can be hard to
understand and it does not seem very productive. Reading about what we have not learned

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confuses me on what the reading really is about or how I should comprehend the paper. The
response that I have for the reading assigned feels as if I am making it all up because I do not
understand the reading which ultimately affects the discussion I should be having following the
reading. For example, when writing about discourse communities from Swales The Concept of
Discourse Community, I did not understand the reading very much at all. I had to research
further about discourse communities and this helped me a lot when it came to writing the
discussion post.
From this class, I essentially expect to improve on my writing. I also expect to understand
more writing concepts. College involves writing many papers and having this class within our
first year really gets us writing formally and constructively. Writing classes tend to help by
getting a habit out of the reviewing and drafting processes, which most students do not do if it is
not required. I expect to understand the drafting process even more than I do now and make it
something that I will use throughout the remaining of college and graduate school. I also hope to
improve on different ways to brainstorm for my writing, other than a typical outline. I tend to
take a very long time when it comes to starting a paper, just because it is hard for me to visualize
the point I want to get across or how I want to write to my audience. We have already worked on
some of the things that I wish to improve on. During our in class assignment, when we had to go
out on campus and find different examples of genre, this helped with not only my understanding
of genre, but brainstorming for the genre analysis also.
Overall in this course I have worked very hard. I believe that I deserve an A in this
course. Both my efforts and my assignments reflect it. Even though some assignments that I have
turned in do not seem perfect, I believe that the effort I have put towards them illustrates the
grade that I deserve.