I came into this writing class on my hands and knees, after a thorough and brutal one-two punch from Ap Lang and Ap Lit. Because of my previous writing class experience, I was not looking forward to dive back into the world of writing. To my pleasure and surprise, I found my writing to a considerably more enjoyable process. At the start of the semester, I found myself not clearly thinking about my new ideas before transferring them into my essay. For example, I ended a paragraph in my first essay with this sentence: “Furthermore, by relating his argument to this out of proportion fear, Carr is decreasing the ethos and logos of his argument.” This is an entire claim unto itself, it has no right to be hanging on to the back of a paragraph. Such a blunder reveals a tendency I had at the beginning of the semester, which was to introduce to much information without ever clarifying it enough. By not clarifying enough information throughout the essay, I would have to tie up all of the loose ends in the final paragraph I would end up having the crux of my argument revealed right before the finish. For example, in the revision of my first essay, I revealed “placing the epicenter of academic activity in a medium designed to wear away attention seems, at best, unwise.” I clarified the whole focus of my essay at the very end, meaning that for the rest of my essay, the reader had to assume for themselves what the essay was about. I improved in this area a lot over the course of the class. The first time I really saw improvement in this area was during the first draft of the Bechdel essay. I supplemented all of my claims with specific quotes and even photos from the graphic memoir itself. My favorite work I produced in this class – Exit West: Hidden Realism and Dystopian Technologies – exhibited the most amount of positive qualities we discussed in class, and was also the most interesting topic to me. I brought focus to my essay that made the process of writing much easier. A move that I found really helped was the use of sub-headers, like in the Exit West, essay the sub-headers “The Missing Link”, “The Distortion of Time”, and “Technology – Black Mirror in Exit West”. The evolution of my writing over the course of the semester followed a path clarity. My writing began very broad and moved into a narrow and more specific style. I found the readings on information architecture very interesting, particularly the psychology of how information architecture affects our cognition. I would like to research that topic in greater depth, specifically the biological aspect of these changes in cognition. This class really expanded my view of writing’s ability to express ideas.
Honor Code: DD
