Patrick Witt English 1101 Final Reflection Over the course of this semester, I have learned about myself,

and the world around me. I have learned how to define different communities, and what makes each community unique to itself. During this half of the semester, we focused more on the idea of discourse communities, and how these communities form. A discourse community usually forms around a business, or an idea for a business. Along with learning about discourse communities, we looked more into siting sources correctly, how to revise our own work, and how to get over our fears involving writing. In order to better understand the idea of a discourse community, we were all assigned an ethnography. We were all allowed to choose our own discourse community for our paper. I originally wanted to research the United States Air Force. I chose the USAF because of my own military background, being a marine. However, I was not able to find a member of the Air Force willing to let me interview them. Because of this setback, I had to choose a different discourse community. I decided to stay with the Military theme, just with a different branch. My first thought was to transition from the Air Force to the Army, but I met the same problems I had while trying to interview an Airman. This led me to choose the United States Navy as my discourse community. Luckily, I still kept in touch with some sailors that I knew while I served in the Marine Corps. I asked a few of them if they would let me ask them a few questions about the navy. One of them answered. Ms. Karras taught me about life in the Navy,

and showed me the difference between what most Marines perceive as Navy life, and what Navy life is actually like. After we finished our Discourse Community Ethnography, we started to look more into the revision process involved in writing. This helped teach all of us what to look for while re writing our papers as well as to teach some of the students the importance of attention to details. While in class, we would look at different writers and their methods for revising some of their works. We would also go over samples of other students writing. This was to both help us look at a paper for things that could be improved, as well as get us familiar with the idea that not every first draft is perfect. Finally, we learned how to create our own portfolios. This was interesting to me, because prior to this class, I had never created anything like it. I learned how to post documents online, as well as how to edit my own website.