When I first started ENC 2135 I was pretty confident in my writing as I always felt like I
excelled in my English classes in high school. But, as I sat struggling to write these papers, I
realized that I definitely had room to grow as a writer in the future. From each project I learned
something knew to add to my skill set as a writer and after completing this course I do genuinely
feel that I have improved.
For my investigative study project, I was having a really hard time choosing a topic as I
was an exploratory major. To my dismay I ended up choosing nursing which looking back I must
have been losing my mind. Nonetheless I carried on with the specific topic being “nursing life
satisfaction” as I hoped that it would help me decide if I really wanted to go down this career
path or not. My biggest take away after completing this essay that I can say with confidence is
that I will not be majoring in nursing. Hurray! As for my writing skills in this essay I would say
they were very sub Pare. After reviewing what I thought was a good paper I soon realized that
half of it made absolutely no sense. Once I had this realization the mistakes that really stood out
to me the most were my organization as a whole and my individual paragraph structures. I used
these mistakes to help guide me in the next assignment.
In the rhetorical analysis assignment, I made the decision to go to the writing center for
assistance as I wanted to improve from project 1. My biggest take away from the tutoring session
was that I needed to show how the authors wording and descriptions made the audience feel
rather than how the author was feeling while writing the article or speech. This helped me
correctly use pathos throughout my paper and other assignments. Additionally, I also think that I
did much better with my organization within this paper, specifically with using stronger topic
sentences. This really helped my writing flow more and definitely was less confusing than the
investigative field essay. This paper was also much easier for me to write because it felt like a lot
less research which always takes me such a long time in comparison to identifying rhetoric
devices.
After the Rhetoric analysis essay, I was much more confident in the third project which
was the multi genre persuasive campaign and rhetoric rationale. I continued with nursing being
my discourse community and focused on advocating for nurse burnout as I already had done
research on it in my prior papers. I also thought making the three artifacts was much less
stressful than either of the previous projects. I took what I learned from the exercises in class
involving genre and how you change your way of writing in relation to your audience.
For my project 4 global revision I followed your advice and fixed my rhetoric analysis
paper. By using your comments, I was able to clarify several sections while also fixing small
mistakes along the way. Some one of my big revisions for the paper was adding another
paragraph to describe how the author used pathos and logos within the provisions so that I was
accurately identifying each rhetoric device.
The two artifacts that I chose were my project 3 reflection and the genre exercise
discussion post. The project 3 reflection helped me realize how much I took away from the
second project and how it helped me write project 3. Additionally, the genre exercise also
assisted in project 3 as I was able to fully understand how different genres have an effect on the
way you write and how I could apply that to my three artifacts I chose to create.
All in all, I really enjoyed this class! I learned a lot and I’m really grateful for everything
you taught us. I can’t wait to apply it to my future writing classes!
