Tate 1

Annie Tate
Mrs. Thomas
UWRT 1102-007
25 April 2016
Final Reflection
1. Choose a song or musical composition that communicates your experience with writing and
UWRT 1102. Consider including a video of the song. Explain your choice.
I chose the song Separate Ways (Worlds Apart) by Journey to represent my experiences in
UWRT 1102. The song illustrates my struggles with letting go of the high school style of
writing, where you cant use I, you cant include your own opinions, and you are supposed to
follow a particular format. Basically, the song is about two people who break up and part ways,
but they still have respect for and care about each other. I still think that the high school way of
writing is okay, but we just arent at the same place anymore. I have moved on. However, I
sometimes wish that I could still use it. Part of the song says, Losing ground Im reaching for
you. Sometimes when writing my thesis, I wanted to just go back to the simpler, cut and dry
method of writing like I did in high school, so that song lyric describes my experience. Another
part of the song says, You know I still love you, though we touched and went our separate
ways. I will always remember my old ways of writing, but I have accepted that I cannot use
them anymore and moved on.
2. If you were to teach this class, what ideas would you emphasis?
If I was teaching this class, one of the biggest ideas that I would emphasis is that there are lots of
different ways to write. In high schools everywhere, students are taught certain rules and
templates that their papers must follow or they get points off. In college, you have much more

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freedom of how you want to structure your writing and what you want to include. Also, I would
let the students pick their topics, like Mrs. Thomas did, because papers will be stronger if the
writers are interested in what they are writing about. In addition, I would stress the importance
of careful and thorough peer reviews. It is my favorite part of the writing process, and I take it
seriously. Students need to understand just how important feedback and advice from readers is
to the success of the paper. Just because the writer understands what they are saying, does not
mean that their audience does.
3. Explain how your understanding of rhetorical knowledge has changed over the course of the
semester using at least three examples from your writing. Ex. Did you shift an assignment to
better fit a particular genre like a proposal?
Before I was in UWRT 1102, I had never heard of rhetorical knowledge. Even after it was
explained to me, it still took me a while to get a good grasp on it. Little did I know that I have
always had rhetorical knowledge, I just didnt know that there was a name for it. When I first
started on my inquiry proposal, I was planning on making my thesis totally objective, only
stating the facts without opinions. However, I decided that to make it more interesting for my
audience, I would make it a little less scientific and boring by adding in some of my own
stories and thoughts. As I was writing my thesis, I discovered that it started getting too
homeschool laden. Since I have always attended public school, I sometimes assume that
everyone already knows everything about it. However, that is definitely not the case. I had to go
back and make sure I added in enough information about public schools so that the paper
wouldnt seem biased toward one side or the other. While writing my thesis, I started coming up
with a lot of information that I wanted to include, but I didnt because it wouldnt have fit very
well with the direction I was going in. One thing that I wanted to add was more about the

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everyday schedule of homeschooling. I originally intended to put in a possible schedule of a
homeschoolers day so the readers could get a feel for what it is like. However, I couldnt find a
good way to work it in and it didnt fit well with the rest of the paper.
4. Explain how your critical reading has improved during the semester. Ex. In what ways did
you read across texts for connections and patterns in your inquiry?
My critical reading skills have greatly improved over the course of the semester. In the past, I
have used sources many times, but this is the first class that required me to deeply read and
understand the sources instead of just simply pulling information from them. Also, we were
required to find at least two peer-reviewed journal articles. These can be difficult to read,
making it even harder to actually find useful information from them. After looking at a few, I got
used to the formatting and felt more comfortable with them. As far as reading across texts goes,
many of my sources contained similar information. This required me to read carefully and
examine the sources to see if the facts matched up. If they didnt, I researched further to make
sure I was collecting the most factual information that I could. Also, many sources led to me
others that were just as helpful, and gave me fresh ideas that I hadnt previously thought of.
5. Discuss your composing processes. Ex. Did you conduct additional research while revising or
after consulting a colleague? Provide at least three examples to support your assertion.
When writing papers, I usually like to have a good idea of what I want my paper to be about and
how to structure it, then I go from there. For my thesis however, this method did not work well
because I changed some things. I had to conduct lots of extra research to keep the paper going in
my intended direction. While writing my annotated bibliographies, I thought that the seven
sources I found were perfect and encompassed all of the information I needed to complete my
thesis. I didnt think that there was anything else I needed to include. I was proved wrong when

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I added several sources and decided not to use a few of my original seven sources. I have found
that when writing, your direction might change, forcing you to do more research and even
abandon some of your previous work. For example, I had originally intended to incorporate
some common myths of homeschooling explained by Michael Romanowski, a professor from
Qatar University, into my thesis. I originally included this source in my annotated
bibliographies. It was actually one source that I was sure I wanted to include when I first started
writing. However, my direction changed and I decided not to use the source at all. Instead, I
wanted to include more information about out-of-school organizations for homeschoolers, which
required me to conduct further research. It brought me to both the National Math Honor Society
and Eta Sigma Alpha, each of which proved to be useful sources in my thesis. Something else
that I wanted to add to my thesis was a history of both public and homeschooling. I had already
done a small amount of research for the inquiry proposal, but not enough. It wasnt until writing
my thesis that I figured out that I wanted to add more. So, I discovered Edmund Sass and the
Coalition for Responsible Home Education for this information.
6. Provide at least three examples of your knowledge of conventions. Ex. sentence level changes,
MLA citations.
Correcting convention mistakes in papers is one of my favorite parts of the writing process.
Sometimes when writing, it is easy to quickly type up your thoughts, but make lots of mistakes
along the way. I like to read back over my papers and pick out all of the grammar mistakes. I
also enjoy reading papers and coming up with better ways to phrase sentences. It is amazing
how small things like the phrasing of sentences can improve a paper so much. As a result of peer
reviewing, it was brought to my attention that journal titles should be in italics. So, I went back
through all of my bibliographies and made the small, but important change. I even made

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grammar mistakes in this reflection! In my response to number five, I wrote, It brought me to
both the National Math Honor Society and Eta Sigma Alpha, which both proved to be useful
sources to use in my thesis. One of my peer reviewers made the suggestion to take out either
useful or use because it sounds redundant. I agreed with her and made the change to
...proved to be useful in my thesis. In the same sentence, I made another change. After
reading over my draft again, I noticed that I used both twice in the original sentence, which I
repeated above. I modified it to say, It brought me to both the National Math Honor society and
Eta Sigma alpha, each of which proved to be useful sources in my thesis. Each of the changes
resulted in the construction of a stronger sentence.
7. Critical Reflection: A) Explain the importance of reflection in learning processes. B) Explain
what you think is important in providing commentary on others work and receiving commentary
on your own. C) Provide at least three examples of your nuanced use of commentary in your
writing projects.
A) Critical reflection is extremely important in the writing process. I think that all papers, no
matter what stage of the writing process they are in, can be improved. Also, it is very important
to read back over your paper, even if you think you are done, because there could be mistakes
you missed or parts of it you think you finished but you really didnt.
B) Giving and receiving commentary is my favorite part of the writing process. Sometimes
when writing, I seem to hit a brick wall and struggle to come up with what to say next or what
other information I should include. Receiving commentary helps to alleviate the stress of being
stuck and gives me an opportunity to see how a reader will comprehend my words. There is a
huge difference between me reading my own paper and trying to improve it and someone else
doing it. I understand what I am saying because I wrote it, but readers dont have that advantage.

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Getting feedback from the readers point of view is crucial to creating a successful paper. It is
for this same reason that I love reading my peers papers. I like getting to help them through the
process, and I enjoy getting to read about their topics and learn new information.
C) Like I mentioned earlier, I love getting and receiving commentary on papers. However, that
doesnt mean that you always have to use the suggestions that people give you. Someone in my
peer review group suggested that I interview homeschoolers and put their responses in my thesis.
While I love that idea, I didnt think that it would add much to my paper. I had already compiled
plenty of information similar to what I would have gotten from an interview in blogs, so I
decided not to do it. Another piece of commentary that I received was to research more about
the curriculum of public school that homeschooling parents didnt agree with. I did add some
information about this, but I did not go into too much detail about it because there were lots of
other things that I wanted to touch on instead. Regarding curriculum, I talked about how parents
cannot control everything that their kids learn at school and that homeschoolers can create
customizable curriculum to suit them. My peer-review group also suggested that I add some
more of my own voice in my thesis, such as whether or not I would ever consider
homeschooling. I did add a few more of my opinions, but I didnt want them to overpower the
facts and make the paper seem biased. So, I made sure that I labeled my own statements as
opinions, and stressed that everyone should decide for themselves whether or not they agree.