Final Blog Post

            It would be expected that as an engineering major, I would not enjoy English class.  While I did prefer my more math and science based classes, I found English 103 to be, on the whole, a very useful and not too painful class. I liked how the class was based not just on writing for the sake of writing, but actually on writing with a purpose and a goal.  Even though I am majoring in engineering, I know that there will still be times in my college career and beyond where I will have to express myself through writing.  I think the papers that we had to write for this class did a good job of preparing me for that.  The thought process that I went through in writing these papers helped me understand my writing better and how I could better use it to accomplish my goals.  I also found the feedback on the rough drafts of my papers to be very helpful with my writing.  It allowed me to see what someone else saw when they read my paper because I feel like a lot of times when I am working on a paper I get so into writing it that I don’t take a moment to step back and look at it as a whole from an outside perspective.   

            Even though I did like the class overall, there were a few things about English 103 that I would have changed.  One of the things that I did not like about the course was the work that we did with the Envision in Depth books.  I understand that the point of that was to help us better understand how to write, but I did not feel that it did that.  I think the best way to do that would be to look at our own writing and work with that.  This work to me was almost just busy work.  While one of the things I liked about the class was that there wasn’t too much that we did that I would put under this category of busy work, I think this was one of those things.  I also didn’t like the time we spent in class working on our papers.  I guess the idea of getting ahead on my paper and having the teacher to reference for help was good, but in reality that didn’t really happen.  I wasn’t able to accomplish very much work in this time and I think for me personally I could have accomplished more if I just stayed in my dorm room and worked on it.  What I think might work better for future classes would be on these days designated for working on papers, making it optional to come to class so that you could ask the teacher any questions that you may have.

            Overall I think I took away a lot from this class and it was very helpful for my writing.  I think the most important thing that I got out of the class was how to use rhetoric to make my writing more powerful.  Rhetoric is a very useful and important tool and I think the focus that we paid to it in this class will be very helpful to me in my writing in the future.