Jordan Rodriguez 5/10/2024

I believe that while I was a strong writer at the beginning of the year, I have improved as a writer with the learning outcomes over the semester with all of our assignments. I believe I achieved most of the course learning outcomes this semester to a high extent. I examined how attitudes towards linguistic standards empower and oppress language users when I wrote for our language project about my own struggles, and learned how every single person had language struggles of their own. I was able to explore and analyze in writing and reading a variety of genres and rhetorical situations as well with all of the readings we did. With the previous research essay, I developed strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing. When planning my essay and filling out the worksheets I recognized & practiced key rhetorical terms & strategies. And finally I did use digital technologies to address a range of audiences, although I did not do any printing. Learning these skills in college even if it doesn’t specifically relate to your major is useful because most jobs require you to write things like reflections and papers.

When I was writing for my language project about my relationship with Spanish and English and how it affected me and my upbringing, it was very personal to me. Writing about something makes you think about it more and it makes me realize it affected me more than I thought. Then after becoming really attached to the project and having stronger feelings about it than I did before, hearing that others felt the same way was a great feeling. I also learned how linguistic standards empowered others, and not just oppressed them like they did for me. It was inspiring and made me feel like me and all of my peers are more connected than I originally realized.

When we read stories like June Jordan’s “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You”: and  Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” I had to analyze them despite their differences. Analyzing these texts was valuable because they were very different from things I read in High School. The “Mother Tongue” text specifically was similar to the language project so I believe it was valuable for me to read. We also analyzed their rhetorical situations and I learned what a Rhetorical situation is in the first place. The Rhetorical situation is like an all encompassing group of everything involved with a story, including the audience, context, purpose, and message. 

When writing my Research essay, I started off by brainstorming ideas for what I wanted to write about. I started by writing what my main points would be for those ideas, and reading articles for those ideas and analyzing them. I then used what I learned reading them and decided that the project on AI would be the best route. I showed my project to my peers and they gave me valuable feedback, and then I gave them feedback on their work as well. I continued to draft my project and revise it to improve it. Finally I got feedback from my professor, which helped me finalize my essay. I fixed the grammar mistakes that I did not pick up. Hearing your essay read aloud to you helps you realize things that you missed, and helps you improve. I also added a fourth source that shows the current state of the lack of Governmental AI regulation.

When I was researching for my research essay I used the internet in order to research for my project. I looked at research databases and used Google to look for my sources. I also created a keynote presentation for the language project in order to share my ideas while I spoke. This gave others a visual for what I spoke about. I did not do any printing over the semester, however I could have printed out notes to use during my presentation, or printed out my work for reference. I feel like my technology skills are very adequate and I feel like typing out essays is much much easier than writing them by hand. Writing on the computer allows me to write much faster, easily and quickly fix mistakes, and much more easily collaborate on work. I think that this makes me a much better writer, as writing by hand on a test or on paper in general is somewhere where I struggle quite a lot. When I write things by hand my hand cramps up easily, I can’t easily make edits, and I can’t write my ideas as fast as I come up with them so I perform much worse. This is why I am thankful for technology allowing me to overcome these issues.

In conclusion, I believe I have achieved the 5 learning outcomes over the course of this semester throughout all of our projects and work. I think that the things I learned will make me not just a better writer, but also a better reader, presenter, researcher, editor, and peer-reviewer. These tools are useful because real world jobs require these skills, even if they aren’t specifically writing or reading related jobs.