AWD Reflection

Coming back from coop, I wasn’t looking forward to an English class and writing a bunch of essays within 8 weeks. I hadn’t written any essays in a while and knew that AWD would be a handful. After taking College Writing, I was confident that AWD was going to be another English class where the teacher gives you a prompt and expects you to write a 1500 word paper every week with minimal interaction with other students. However, after the first two days, I was relieved that it wasn’t going to be boring cause we had a young teacher who we could relate to. Since the first week, I have had an open mind to all the assignments in class and wanted to see the direction the class would take me.

The thin slicing assignment was a totally different idea that I wasn’t used to, which changed my way of thinking. Throughout my years studying English, I have always been told what to write about, the structure of the paper, and goal of the paper. This specific assignment asked us to look at certain aspects of our topic throughout 30 years and follow the trend and its evolution. At first, it was intimidating as it was hard to look for something substantial while looking through hundreds of articles and boring titles. However, after coming to class and hearing other peers’ ideas, it made it easier for me to analyze my research and find a goal for my paper. Peer review meetings helped for all assignments as you receive constructive criticism and are able to enhance your analysis from a different perspective. However, close reading is the complete opposite of thin slicing and took me sometime to get my head around it. This was easier than the thin slicing assignment as it was finding something small and linking it to a broader picture. Since we were already familiar with the topic it was easy to find things to talk about.

The abstract assignment was a very interesting assignment because it opened our minds to different disciplines and connected it to our own discipline to create a concise abstract. This assignment brought my attention to specific words, sentence structure, and language used in the abstract. My partner and I took time looking at every sentence and seeing if it meant what we were trying to say. This helped me understand language on a higher level and understanding the different meanings that specific words give out.

The workplace writing assignment was a straightforward assignment as we had dealt with the language before at our respective coops. Being able to analyze our genre documents demonstrated a deeper understanding of English in our everyday lives since we pointed out the audience it appealed to and how it was presented to them. This helped me understand the micro and macro aspects of the genre document.

Being an accounting major English was never my strong spot, however this course has illustrated that writing is valuable and shown me its strengths. This course is very engaging and nothing like College Writing. I hope to learn more in the next two assignments and reflect on my assignments in my final portfolio.