Logan Simmons

Megan Keaton
ENC 1102
July 29, 2014
Final Reflection
When I came into this class at the beginning of the semester, I did not have a theory of
writing. I did not care about writing, I hated doing it, and I hated reading it. To be quite honest,
most of these things have not changed over the course of the semester, but I have been able to
develop my own theory of writing as we progress farther and farther though this class. Before I
took this course, I was never enrolled in any class that forced me to write nearly this much, let
alone as thoughtfully. Every class that I have taken in the past focused very little on writing, and
the most writing that would be expected of us would be a simple research paper. In this class, we
were forced to write in many ways that most of us have never had to write before such as writing
thoughtful revision explanations and applying information learned about key terms in class. I
credit my newfound theory of writing to this basic fact.
I do not think that my theory was necessarily shaped by any individual assignment or
project. In fact, I wasnt even aware of the presence of my theory of writing until I read about
this assignment and started thinking about it. Because of that simple fact, it is kind of difficult to
break down the development of my theory based on individual assignments. However, these
assignments sparked my brain thinking about writing in a different way than I have before. When
I wrote my Inquiry Research Paper and remediated my findings from the Key Terms Exploration
Project, I had to really think about writing in some very new ways. I had to apply what I had
learned and think about how this new information was affecting the world around me. When we
remediated our Key Terms Exploration Project into a flyer, I had to think about the most
effective method of conveying some complex ideas in a simple way. Before doing this project, I
had never really had to do that before, and that is why I believe that this contributed to my theory
of writing the most. This assignment sparked my thought process for developing my theory.
From writing our Semi-Formal Reflections, Curious Researcher Reading Responses, and
presenting the Curious Researcher Demonstration, my brain was able to change the way that I
looked at writing, and made me start thinking about the way our world works based on our
collective understanding and usage of writing as a society. Before any of these assignments, I
never really looked into the effect that writing has had on each of our lives. This class and the
individual assignments that we were required to do allowed me to start really thinking about how
we have come this far as a human race, and what makes us so much different than other animals
on this planet.
In addition to the individual assignments that I have described above, in-class activities
such as group discussions and making of comic strips or flow charts also helped to develop my
theory of writing. I really loved participating in these in-class activities because they gave me a
chance to apply my knowledge and communicate it with my peers, which ultimately helps each
and every one of us understand writing even better than we already had. I believe that my theory
of writing can be adapted and applied to teach individuals to love writing, which will help us
advance farther and farther with technologies and collectively as a human race. If more
individuals develop a love for writing, or at least understand how important it is to our society,
than I believe that we can advance even faster than what is already believed. We are in a golden
age of development, and I believe that it is important to get as many individuals involved with
helping us as possible. If we all work together and use writing as a means of communicating and
expressing ideas even more than we already do, then the possibilities for the future are endless.