Being able to communicate in a diverse range of contexts and tones is what has separate humans from animals. Writing is a very important skill to learn. From emails, to writing letters to a boss, a significant other, or writing a cover letter for a job, writing, like verbal language is a way to communicate. Being able to get to the central thesis of an argument, of being able to understand what another person is saying and why, and how they are proving their premises, is important of anyone interacting with the world. In order to enter a debate, must know how to speak the lingo of debate, and make a valid argument whose conclusions follow from the premises. While I am by no means an expert at this yet, I understand the basic concepts of how this works much better than I did prior to entering this course.
Though there were times this semester when I felt like I could have done better on assignments if I could do them over again, I see this as a generally good thing. This means that I have learned a lot in this course. I was very happy with my Diverse Perspectives grade. This was not as challenging as some of the other assignments, since I naturally tend to try to look at people and situations from a variety of perspectives. I see from my rubric summary that there are areas that I can continue to work on and grow, one being issue identification and focus. I naturally tend to like tangents and to use one theme to explore another, but I realize that in academic writing that this does not helps one’s cause but instead creates writing that is difficult ot follow and this weakens the overall thesis.
In honestly assessing my scores when compared with others, I naturally feel that I could have and should have done better in this course. I recognize that I was not always on top of my own schedule, and with other classes and other personal obligations it is not always easy to keep everything in the balance. I suppose this is one window into that “real world” that people talk about to kids from an early age. It is easy to imagine how much better one could do if they were simply able to focus all of their time and energy on once class or one goal or one assignment. But in the real world things are much more dynamic than that. People need hurry through one thing to get to the next. I often had to work on assignments while at the same time studying for this class or the other. This is not to say that this is not the shared reality of every student in college since the beginning of college time, but it does make me think that the scores that I am not overly proud of do not necessarily reflect my ability, but my putting my best foot forward given the circumstances I was working under. I also realize that I need to pay more attention in class and not be distracted by my phone or mobile devices. Education costs money, and so not paying attention is a waste of that.
In this class I have learned how important it is to o ethically document my writing so that I can write on a certain topic with authority. I am happy with how far I’ve come, the things that I have learned, and how this course has made me a better writer and I hope to continue to grow in this regard.
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