Last Minute Thoughts

When I walked in to a class of almost all guys I thought I walked into an engineering class instead of my English class. Once that was sorted I was still confused, thinking this was just going to be another English class based on literature. I did not realize that this class would have a greater emphasis on composition. Even though I usually prefer math classes to English, I like how the material in this class emphasized communication versus analysis of particular passages. The school’s promotion of “writing across the curriculum” is understandable considering we need to be able to express our ideas through writing, even in math-oriented classes. Because a lot of my previous English classes were about literature, I do not remember ever having an emphasis on solely rhetoric and dissecting the uses of ethos, pathos, and logos in material. Often I think English classes are ridiculed for all the time spent looking for symbols and other literary elements for particular readings. In contrast, the papers and projects included in this class were a nice transition to the general level of expected of us in college. The research paper was a nice introduction to the resources available to us on campus, whether from books or other databases. In the past I’ve written papers without an outline or an annotated bibliography and I struggle trying to trudge through to reach the word count. However requiring several intermediate steps before finally writing our draft, it was much easier to ensure that I included all the content I wanted for my argument. Our mandatory trip to the writing center was useful to me, considering I do not usually edit my papers and it gave me the motivation to do so. Although the multimedia project was confusing and seemingly unfocused in the beginning, I enjoyed the freedom we had creating this project. There are not many opportunities to use anything besides word processors to express our ideas. With the multimedia project, I finally get to see what the appeal was for Tumblr and also explore other mediums.

When I reflect on the course, I honestly don’t have much criticism for it. Some of the things we did in class sometimes seemed like ways to pass time and use the 50 minutes. I think the debates were funny but I didn’t particularly feel that I got much out of it. (Although it did emphasize the need to consider both sides of an argument to strengthen one’s, own). Aside from that I didn’t see the relevance of our debate to the research paper. Most days however class was actually somewhat refreshing to the lectures in all my other classes. The class dynamic was nice, and somewhat reminiscent of high school when students knew each other’s names for the most part. Considering that the class encouraged most of us to use the library’s resources for the first time and write a research paper I don’t see why this couldn’t just replace Library 100. It was a good transition to college work and if we were also introduced to the eportfolio I think we wouldn’t need Library 100.