Reflection
Going into this class I had solid and strict definitions of the words ‘text’ and ‘genre.’ Over the course of this class, I grew to understand that those definitions are not nearly as uniform as I was taught in high school. This was a major struggle for me in the beginning but I grew to overcome it through all of my writing. The first test of high school to college writing transition was the blog posts in my working profile. The assignment online simply said “respond” to this writing. My high school geared mind thought “respond how?” “what questions do you want me to answer?” “How do you want me to organize my response?” I learned from now on it’s all me, no teacher or instructor is going to tell me exactly what to do. After the moment of panic passed I sat down and just write down my first thoughts on the writing, and poof there it was, my response.
When I was approached by our first project, the Personal Narrative, I hit head on my struggle with the word ‘text.’ To me, that meant a piece of writing, a group of words like a newspaper, an article, a quote, or a paper. I knew I wanted to write about a time I gave CPR in the hospital but I could not for the life of me think of a text that would be considered a part of that. Then one day in class the instructor realized he needed to open our closed, high school minds and informed us that a text is not just words. A text is anything that conveys a message to a community. That helped me to expand my search for the text that was part of my story but I was still struggling. To help me stay focused on finding what I needed I answered the Guiding Questions from the syllabus. These were extremely helpful and I was then able to think about possible texts I could use and with the help of the instructor I was able to narrow down to the one that fits best with my paper.
In the second project, I also struggled with connecting my ideas to the requirements. I knew I wanted to research mortality rate post in-hospital CPR but I had to still focus my paper around a text my community of nurses uses to communicate about this topic. This is also where I learned how much to use and appreciate the instructor's office hours. It was not until I had some one-on-one time with my instructor that I was able to see how I could connect my ideas to fit the requirements of the paper. He even helped me to find other previous experiences of mine to aid my point in my paper that I hadn’t even thought about. Together we came up with an outline for my paper and I was able to move forward with my research and understand how to apply it to the task at hand.
After project 2 was the remediation of it, or project three. In this project is where my high school definition of ‘genre’ was changed. I needed to find three different modes of communication to promote my ideas from the second paper. I especially learned that there are genres and then subgenres. For example, youtube is a genre and then a TV show clips would be a subgenre. This was so helpful as I was able to use these ideas to create three different ways to promote my argument from my research paper. I created a poster, a Facebook post, and I wrote an email to the American Heart Association to promote people to become CPR certified and to help improve and make the BLS class more effective.
Overall, this class challenged me in many ways. I had to clear the blurs between my ideas and the requirements of my paper. I did this by opening up my mind and ditching my closed definitions of writing terms like ‘text’ and ‘genre.’ I also did this by taking full advantage of the instructor's office hours and the one-on-one time I was able to have with him. I also took advantage of email and other forms of communication to make the most out of my learning. English is still not my favorite subject but I feel much better about it now because in this class I was just told to respond, I was not told how or when or what. I ha to have more confidence in my thoughts and ideas. I now feel more prepared than ever to write more, better constructed papers in my future.