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Maryah Dinane

Professor Intawiwat
Eng 111-25
November 13, 2016
Final Reflection
Dear Professor Intawiwat,
I believe that learning is about connecting with an experience. Aside from the 2+2=4
definition, an active engagement relies on joining possible learning experiences with what we
want to make sense of the world. My experience with English 111-25 has taught me how to link
creativity with composition. Learning various topics require different types of cognition; during
the process of this semester I realized that through certain assignments like the This I Believe
Essay and the Zine that I have learned more about myself and how analyzing my work helps me
become cognizant of my writing approaches.
The Written Literacy topic was the initiation of my focus on rhetorical knowledge, it
included writing assignments enabling my critical thinking and reflection skills. In the major
writing assignment, This I Believe essay, we were instructed to simply write about something we
believed in and why. After I contemplated what I actually believed in, I choose to write about
love. The purpose of this decision was based on my current relationship and how you cant
experience what is on the other side of the fence until you jump over it (Maryah 4). I wanted to
reach an audience that could relate to my aspirations of love and could hear my voice through the
written words while feeling my passion bursting with emphasis. I want the audience to be
inspired to take a chance even if it doesnt feel right at the time: it may give you an endless
blossom of opportunities. This essay surprisingly didnt get revised, maybe a few sentences and

grammatical errors but for the most part I didnt have to revise the essay. Though the topic of the
essay was challenging because it was hard for me to interpret a personal meaning but once I
overcame the challenge, I was reaching towards my academic goal. I was very pleased to tackle
this challenge and developed self-motivation to think I can do this.
Stimulating two of my five senses, the Visual/Oral Literacy topic made me to understand
the importance of absorbing the energy of visual and oral stimuli in order to cultivate
environmental awareness. The people watching experience encouraged me to be aware of
peoples purpose in their decisions and I found it interesting that many individuals interact with
each other. I also found it interesting how each of those individuals have a certain subculture
they belong to: the subculture theme was then directed to the major project the, Ethnography.
The process I went through to compile my thoughts into an essay was brain storming my ideas
on subcultures and writing them down, then narrowing it to the ones that I can relate to the most.
After this stage, I researched articles that had a similar meaning to my perception. I also wanted
to incorporate pathos by interviewing famous photographers via e-mail, but unfortunately not
many responded so I had conflicting views on genre, format, and the intellectual composition of
my essay. This assignment was probably the most challenging for me because I didnt
communicate with myself about how I would integrate the interview into the essay. I under
estimated the difficulty of the assignment and after I interviewed my friend Jesse I came to a
halt. It was then that I realized how to use the SLO composing process. By taking time to
organize myself, I learned how to use [a] writing process in order to deepen engagement with
source material. After numerous revisions, I finally connected the responses from the interview
with the purpose of my essay and I synthesized my primary and secondary research to strengthen

my composition. My essay evolved with each revision because as I revised and reread, a new
concept would arise, therefore revision was a key element for my work as a whole.
I grew up with technology, though when we entered the Digital Literacy topic I was a bit
lost. The main project was the digital narrative, where we had to create a presentation on how we
evolved with technology. I decided to use Prezi which is an advanced power point software that
gives you more options for added information and aesthetics. I began the assignment with ease
later to find out Id be up at 12am trying to figure out how to operate Prezi. The project evolved
through its revisions because the more I was using Prezi, the more I discovered its operations.
This assignment taught me that, I dont have to pretend to live in the digital era because I dont
know everything about it and I should to step back to acknowledge that.
I have always liked Pop Culture, so I was looking forward to the assignments in the Pop
Culture topic. The main project was the Zine assignment: we were instructed to create a
magazine from a original topic or a theme of our choice. I chose the theme of traveling because
Ive always wanted to travel to certain destinations so why not write about them! I was trying to
achieve a realistic looking magazine along with interesting articles, I did this using a software
called Joomag. This was definitely a noggin nudger, I had the same experience with Joomag that
I had with Prezi. After I figured out how to use Joomag, I actually found this project the most
interesting and fun because youre using your personal view of the world accompanied by your
imagination to create something that is essentially already established. Magazines are tangible
items that already exists but I think it interesting that we are creating something that looks
realistic when universally everything we surround ourselves with is realistic.
I believe that I am self-motivated to participate in class, if I dont understand I dont mind
asking questions and I dont mind helping my classmates, in fact I like helping people and

talking with people. Throughout high school I was so worried about being liked by a certain
subculture that I didnt focus on my grades as much as I should have. I never had any doubts
about if I was going to pass or fail but it was a psychology of how well can I pass with being lazy
so, now Im in college trying to redeem myself to myself. I know how determined I can be if I
put my mind to it and the high school me wasnt how well I know I can perform academically.
My writing dramatically improved since high school. For starters Ive created a system to initiate
my essay process: I brainstorm, then organize my essay into paragraphs and decide what goes
into certain paragraphs, I do some research about the topic to see how I can incorporate quotes
and how I can interpret secondary information, then I leave all those tabs open put on some
classical music and begin. This method has been working tremendously for me and the college
environment as helped me manage my time and be more independent. By being more
independent, Im not relying on whats usually given to me in high school, Im focusing on
putting in extra time and effort to ensure personal and academic satisfaction. For example: the
front page of my e-portfolio has descriptions and visual examples of the literacies we learned
about in class, at the beginning of each topic page there are pictures hinting to the audience about
its content, some of my pages have moving photos to liven up the aesthetics, and I also added a
scroll up button to make navigation convenient. Therefore, my composition has increased to a
studiously diligent degree in lieu of just doing homework just to get the grade. Within a time
from of about 6 months I have absorbed so much information like how to manage writing an
essay or how to conceptualize secondary information to support my thesis that I even learned
things unconsciously such as my specific writing procedure. This semester is my greatest period
of personal growth and self-discipline so far in my academic career. This critical reflection

helped me understand how Ive made it this far and why Im going to continue to thrive from a
challenge.

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