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Jacob Unell Mr. Borrero 1101-025 18 April, 2012

What all did I do and learn in this class? I learned a lot ranging from how my paper can improve to how to see writing as a whole. This paper will focus on my transition as a writer though out this course, and how I can grow farther. In order to achieve this I must discuss my expectations for the class, my decisions and how they affected me, my change in writing between projects and how they affected my view of literacy, and lastly I would like to discuss a few things in my portfolio. At the beginning of this class I expected to have nothing, but boring essays to write and revise. I did not have high hopes for this class to benefit me in a large way. My expectations changed the first day of class when I was informed that the grading system would be based on overall performance of work rather than an average of several assignments. I then expected to grow in my abilities to write and read. This was no longer limited to pen and paper when I was told that an apple was a text. This opened my prospective of what this class would include. Later after learning the whole scope of what a text could be, I expected to widen my assignments to just essays. This came true in the multi-module project were I wrote a manual of my literacy history out of strictly poems. The second assignment threw me in having to then research how a sub-culture saw literacy. I expected to have trouble finding out this information. Also I expected

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to have trouble putting all of the information into an essay. After all of the work and time I expect to be able to use what I have learned in this class in the future. At the beginning of the course I did not make the best of choices to produce me my best work. I use to try and work on assignments in my living which is normally very noisy and distracting. After the reflection we had about the environment we completed our first essay, I realized that this had to change and I did my work at either the library or my room. This proved to be a quiet and non-distracting environment. In the beginning of the course I did not plan my assignments at all. After our first conference you said that I could really benefit from making an outline of my essays. After that I choose to follow your advice and I would make an outline and then fill it in with roughly what I wanted to say. I also took the other advice that you would give me (Example: transitions, purpose statement, focus, conclusions, etc.), and incorporated them in the next assignment the best that I could. Then the next time we talked I would try to revise my writing process that much more. I believe that the choices that I made set me up for success in the long run. In the beginning I did not make very good choices, but as the course progressed I changed the way I did things in order to produce the best product that I could do. Also I choose topics that challenged me as a writer. This included writing a 22 page technical manual out of poems. That was not an easy thing to conceive and complete successfully. Another example is the literacy ethnography sub-culture that I choose. How do you write about the literacy of running? This required extensive research, time, and critical analysis. The critical analysis included looking much deeper from the surface of one foot goes in front of another. I had to think about biomechanics of the human body, and how the event as a whole communicated within itself.

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On top of those choices I had to learn how to plan my writing because before this class I did not know how to effectively plan without feeling like I wasted my time. I now have figured out how to take the points of the assignment or paper, and make an outline in order of how the points should go. I then write out a full answer or discussion to each point as I go down the list. If the next point does not seem to go in order I can change the order before I actually start on the final product. This strategy allows for pre-proofreading to occur. How did I see a movement in my thinking between projects? In the Multi-Modal Literacy Narrative Project I saw a movement within the project itself. I noticed in the beginning I had a very narrow scope for my focus, and that scope limited me to the information that I needed in order to complete the project. I then opened up the scope, but I then had too much information to play with at the time. I was over whelmed and ended up just giving facts about my literacy history in the defense essay instead of trying to make conclusions about the details. In the Ethnography I realized this problem. I decided to focus on making conclusions rather than on details. Now to make those conclusions I would need facts to support it, so I figured that if I focus on conclusions the details needed to support it will be included as well. I believe that this worked out because I had a knowledgeable person about writing look over my Ethnography, and she said that she couldnt change anything. The outcome of the projects included new insights and improvement of my writing. I received new insights from the first project in the form of realizations about my life. I no longer see school as the main contributor of my literacy growth. Also while I did come to conclusions about what affected me and how, I did not include all of them in my defense essay. My writing improved through the use of planning, drafts, and awareness of what I was doing. The second projects outcome was similar, but instead of realizations about myself, I realized the literacy

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within a 5k event and running itself. This will stay with me through life seeing how I have found a new interest in running. My writing improved farther in the second project than the first. This can be proven by the amount of planning it took in order to structure the Ethnography alone. Also I the focus of the piece was more direct. Since I had feedback from the first project by the time the second project was in full swing I had specific points to focus on. In the beginning of the semester my scope of literacy was limited to just reading, writing, and verbal language. After the very first day I learned that literacy can be just about anything. For example, I work on cars and to be able to do that I must be able to read what the car is doing, why it is doing that, and how to fix the problem to make the car work properly. None of the things I mentioned have a thing to do with reading, writing, or verbal communication in the traditional sense. In this class the argument has been made to support that I would be making an act of literacy while fixing a car. This concept deepened even farther in the Ethnography. That is because I had to go into a subconscious level in order to understand the literacy behind running. I went from cut and dry opinions to open minded possibilities. In the beginning of the semester in my intro paper, I wrote about a fairly narrow literacy history that was limited to school, and the narrative was mainly described as a victimized story. As we moved through the project I was exposed to different aspects of my life that I had not thought of before as an influence. By the end of the project I no longer wrote strictly a victim narrative. In the writing itself I became a risk taker. This can be supported by the format of the project itself (technical poem manual). As we progressed in the semester I saw little mistakes that I had made in the essays and in my writing processes. In the multi-modal project I did not proof read it very well, or outline it in detail. In the Ethnography this proved to be insufficient for what I needed to do in order to adequately produce the best research essay that I could.

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In my journals I start as a cut and dry thinker, and describe text as something written. By the fifth entry you can see that my vision of literacy has become broad. The trend of going from the surface level to a deeper level continues until the last entry. This entry, #13, shows how I moved to making conclusions and even asking questions from details that I obtained from my subculture. This can be considered a reflection of my thinking in the class and how it progressed. I also choose to include my first post conference reflection in my Weebly page because I wanted to show how the event helped shape me as a writer. The contents show what we concluded about my literacy history, your thoughts and feelings on my genre pick, and what I had trouble with in writing technical pieces. I included my first post conference reflection in my Weebly page because I wanted to show how the event helped shape me as a writer. The contents show what we concluded about my literacy history, your thoughts and feelings on my genre pick, and what I had trouble with in writing technical pieces. This was very benefiting to help me compose my project. My writing process at first failed to support a possible good product. I did not plan or do any pre-writing at all. I always went straight for the final product, because I always just wanted the grade and to move on. In the beginning I thought planning was a waste of time, but as I progressed I figured out a way that made me feel like I was coming closer to a finished product. I now have a new writing process. This includes research, organizing the research, making an outline for the general concepts of the paper, filling in the outline with what I have to say, taking away the template to expose the writings that I have, make transitions to connect concepts, proofread for clarity, and finally polish the work (revisions). According to the feedback that I have gotten, this process seems to work well, and I dont see any possible problems with this process.

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I believe that I was a risk taker though out this course. This was in order to try and grow as much as possible. Isnt that the point of higher learning? I believe that the risk paid off because the final products seemed to be better than I ever thought I could do. I never thought in my life time that I would write a 22 page manual about my literacy history, or to be able to make conclusions about how literacy ties in with running. These things seemed impossible to me at first, but now I see many more possibilities that are within my grasp. I choose to include the forum about picking our genre for the first project into my Weebly page. I choose to put this in the website to show how I choose my genre. Also I wanted to point out that at the beginning of the project I was only going to do multiple poems. That would have brought the total number of pages to about 10. The fact that I brought it up a notch with tying the poems into a technical piece proves that I was a risk taker and did not play it safe. I have noticed a few things about my writing. I have some strengthens that I take advantage of. I have the ability to learn from my mistakes. That ability is the most critical strength that I have. Without it I cannot learn or grow as a writer and this whole course would not have helped me in any way. Another strength that I have is a clear starting focus. With a clear starting focus I have the potential to stay on track throughout a piece, and this is important seeing how I can get off track some times. The weakness of getting off track can hinder the direction, but having that strong starting focus combats this weakness. Another strength I have is that I can get great detail on a subject within my papers, but my weakness in this field is that I often forget to make a conclusion from the details I provide. To combat this in the future I plan to try and stay more aware of what I am doing in an essay. The parts of the class that helped me the most were the style of the class and the conferences. The style of the class opened opportunities for the class to see themselves in a

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different way. This different way allowed me to see my writing in a new sense and therefore I saw a deeper depth in my writing. This opened up a new level of thinking and revision. The conferences helped me on an individual level that I need to have a personalized understanding. Normally a lecture is given to a general group of people, and the students have to try to make the lesson fit them. The personalized lesson fits the student and therefore lets nothing up for interpretation. Without these aspects of the class I do not feel that I would have learned near as much as I had. The assignments that were challenging for me were the technical manual, and the Ethnography. The reason that the technical manual was a challenge was that I was trying to do something that I had never done before. Trying to format and decide when what rules should apply was a pain in the butt. I got a little frustrated, but I stuck with it and did the best that I could. The Ethnography was a bigger challenge. The shear amount of material to fit into an organized and thought out paper was astounding. I had to plan and plan some more, and after about losing half of my hair I figured out a way to make a case study for the running field as a whole. It was also a challenge to maintain my purpose statement within the paper, because I could have talk in so much more detail on a couple aspects of running, but I would have diverged from the focus of the paper. Oddly the assignments that supported my growth as a writer were the same ones the challenged me the most. While I did have trouble with both products of the projects I also learned how to do many things. Those things include organization, formatting, structure, and how to stay on track to fulfill my purpose statement. Sometimes the things that challenge you the most are the things that make a person great at something.

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The skills that I revised were the purpose statement, word choice, transitions between paragraphs, defining the noun, and the conclusion. I revised my defense essay because I had more things wrong with it than my Ethnography, so I saw it as an opportunity to find more mistakes in my writing. I choose to rewrite the purpose statement because it was not very direct on the goal in mind. Also since we learned about how to write good purpose statements I saw it as more practice to try and get better at it. I focused on explaining the goal in mind and how I planned to achieve that goal. The second skill, word choice, was critical because in some places of the essay the word I used was not even close to what I had in mind, and I know that sometimes I write the wrong word. I believe that I do that because my fingers are trying to keep up with my brain and the words come out mixed up. I fixed my mistakes and now the content makes more sense. The third skill, transitions, was a major issue in my defense essay. I went on for about two pages without moving to a new paragraph. This was corrected in the appropriate places, and made the essay easier to read. The fourth skill, defining the noun, was the most reoccurring skill I needed to work on. Multiple times I would put this is into a sentence and not say what this is. The correction of this would bring clarity to the subject being discussed and father the understanding of the reader to what I am talking about. I went through and corrected the multiple mistakes, and now I believe that in total the essay is a much more readable piece. In conclusion, over the course of this class I have changed as a writer. I no longer believe that literacy is restricted and I have learned my strengths and weaknesses of being an author. I have learned to combat the weaknesses and to use my strengths to my advantage. This course has given me vital information to patience and use in order to continue growing as a writer. The importance of this essay is to show that I did all that I could, and I am highly benefiting from it.