Olivia Pope Elizabeth Hinnant English 1102-030 28 April, 2014

Reflection In this class I have grown a lot in my writing and research skills. My writing developed not in terms of grammar, but in the quality of the content that make up my papers. Everyone can write a perfectly written paper that has zero grammatical issues, but that paper could be complete trash content wise. I did not suddenly improve my writing. It happened over the entire course of the semester. We began our writing with Moodle posts and in-class writings. Additionally as time went on we continued completing a series of papers that were separate, yet connected. We wrote an EIP proposal, an ethnography, an annotated bibliography, and finished it all off by writing the EIP paper. When we began the semester we started by writing homework responses and posting them to Moodle. The purposes of the Moodle posts were to have us constantly writing so that our writing skills would be sharp for the coming assignments. It was required to respond to, usually two, other classmates work in addition to posting our own homework. When we read other classmates work and commented on it, we were in conversation about our writing. This benefitted us because when we received our peers comments, they caught things we would not have as authors. Peer editing and commentary gives us another perspective to our own writing that we may not see, since we are worried with so many details. Often times in our own writing, we are including personal experience, or writing how we feel and are trying to translate that into

Olivia Pope Elizabeth Hinnant English 1102-030 28 April, 2014

a formal paper. It gets difficult trying to read your own paper from a different perspective than your own. I learned a few things from writing the Moodle posts that I can take away and use in my future writing endeavors. First, it just sounds bad to use personal pronouns when writing a formal paper. No one will take a scholar serious in their research writing if they constantly say, I think this, and I think that That makes for a boring and unintelligent sounding paper. Much of our Moodle posts were preparation for another assignment we would have later in the semester. For example we had to read a scholarly article about different types of ethnographies, and we also had to read two ethnographies. These were important because we had to write ethnography ourselves, and it helped to have examples as guidelines for our own ethnographies coming up. Reading the scholarly article on the different types of ethnographies was intertwined with the annotated bibliography we would have to write. It taught us how to read scholarly articles efficiently and successfully so that we would be able to conduct our own secondary research for our paper that was useful and pertinent to our topic. The in-class readings, for me, were mostly prepping for or reflecting on assignments. It helped to put my thoughts on paper because I experienced a lot of frustration in this class throughout the semester. The next big thing we worked on was the EIP proposal. Just before we began writing our first draft, I confused the actual assignment with a previous assignment. Therefore, my EIP proposal first draft is a list of ten questions. The list was actually intended to be the interview for my ethnography. This obviously shows that I had nowhere to go but progress with it from that

Olivia Pope Elizabeth Hinnant English 1102-030 28 April, 2014

point on. It was pretty much the worst it would ever be at that point. This assignment not only prepared us for the long term goal of our actual EIP projects, but it was the point when we picked our topic. This topic would be what all of our major assignments would be working with throughout the class so it was a pretty important decision to make. After much deliberation, I finally picked the topic of private Christian schools. This is a topic that I felt would be observable, and would have some amount of scholarly research supporting it. The next step in this process was to write an ethnography. To start out, I knew nothing ethnographies whatsoever. It was helpful to have two examples of other ethnographies to help me see what they were supposed to look like, and how they should sound. Once I wrapped my mind around the actual idea of an ethnography, I started to ask my question that would later help form my argument. When I wrote my paper, I wrote down all observations, and really struggled to form my actual argument and weave that through my paper. The ethnography served as a foundation for my EIP project. It was how I gathered all of my primary research, my observations, and my argument. I ended up molding my argument a lot before I decided on, The Bible can be taught seamlessly within education, not only in a Bible class. The Moodle posts helped prepare me for this assignment by showing me examples of what good ethnographies were, what to do correctly, what not to do, and had me constantly practicing my writing. The ethnography was only my own primary research though. The next step was to do some secondary research. I searched through tons of scholarly articles to find five sources that pertained to my topic and helped prove my argument. The

Olivia Pope Elizabeth Hinnant English 1102-030 28 April, 2014

homework assignment that had us read the very lengthy scholarly article prepared us for the research we would have to complete on our own. It taught us how to read through them quickly and efficiently. Scholarly articles can be extremely lengthy, so it is important to know how to get through them and find the ones that are going to be of a lot of use to you. It takes a lot of time and patience, but that is how you get the good ones. When writing this annotated bibliography, one important thing that I missed in the instructions was to put the entries in alphabetical order. This assignment was a lot harder, to me, than the ethnography was. I had a very difficult time trying to find articles that actually pertained to my topic and that actually proved my argument simultaneously. A lot of what I had to pick through was religion in general or all about just Christianity alone. I needed information that was on how Christianity functioned in the education world. When teachers can teach about Christianity in a school, it is a lot different than being in a secular public school. The annotated bibliography taught me patience, and taught me not to procrastinate. Overall, the annotated bibliography was a difficult assignment to accomplish. The last assignment was the actual EIP itself. This assignment was a compilation of our ethnographies, our annotated bibliographies, and all that we had learned from any other work we did for the class. Everything that we had worked towards in this class all led up to this one assignment. All of our assignments are intertwined and were all vital parts that led up to this point in the semester. When writing my EIP I found it difficult to use only one tense. I tend to switch tenses mid paragraph. Again though, the content is more important than the grammar;

Olivia Pope Elizabeth Hinnant English 1102-030 28 April, 2014

however, if the person cannot actually read what you wrote because the grammar is so bad, that is when it becomes a huge problem. I learned in this class that one purpose in having to take the course in general education is to show that you can successfully express yourself in a written way. That was tested by doing peer reviews and commentaries. In conclusion, I have learned a lot this semester about myself in this class. I learned that I do express myself written pretty well despite minor grammatical issues. Formal sounds better when writing research. Peers opinions matter. They help you grow and see things from many different perspectives to help better your own writing. I saw purpose in every assignment we had in this class. The course was a chain of events all prepping for the one after it. Some things I found challenging were picking an argument and molding it into what I needed it to be. Another was trying to find secondary research to back my argument up. I would have assumed that Christian education was a pretty popularly written about topic. Something about the class overall that I struggled with was the times that homework assignments and things were due. It was either due at eight p.m., or noon. Those were both extremely difficult times to work around and make sure they happened each time. I still grew in the class though nonetheless. I can say that my writing has developed considerably since I joined the class this semester. Everything we did had a purpose, was difficult and challenging, and contributed to my writing growing.