ENGL 378: Student Comments

Early Reflections on Self/Readings

We often forget writing is work. When I am forced to write a paper it is very hard for me to find the words. Creative writing has really helped me find the words that I have had to pull out of hidden places and put into research papers. I don't ever want to feel like writing is hard or something I am being forced to do, I always want to keep it fun. (Morgan)

With the exception of poetry and artistic/creative writing styles, writing has always seemed, to me, regimented and tedious work. In classes we learned all the “rules” that would, or should, enable us upon graduation from students to “citizen writers,” markedly change, in terms of our presentation, quality and efficacy. (Hayden)

Writing always came easy to me,but it seem tough when asked to write on a specific topic. For example in english class i get specific topics to write about. Throughout the years of bring an english major I have realized that writing gets easier when its a free write. I have always been able to express myself and my thoughts with no given agenda or topic at hand. Writing always seemed to easy to me,however when i was given a certain topic it would take me forever to gather my thoughts and complete the assignment. (Kathy)

Many students don’t care for writing because it reminds them of tests and essays but once you enjoy writing it’s barely even a chore anymore. (Tara)

I had been going through some rough patches in high school and needed a way out. I turned to the journal for help. My personal opinion is, when one writes in a journal it is less likely to be made public as opposed to Facebook, where it is public for everyone to see. Yancey says, “There are new ways of composing a work and the technology is growing.” I knew my journal was not going to be seen by anyone so I grabbed it off the shelf and started writing. I wrote anything and everything from what I was feeling to the weather outside. I experimented with many of styles of writing. I then discovered poetry and stories were my favorite. This was how I found my love for reading as well. Writing in the journal really helped me to deal with what was going on in my life. (Lisa)

To me, there is nothing more relaxing about writing than writing in my journal. Like one of my creative writing instructors said, "If you spend at least five minutes a day writing, you will get better and better at it." Simply put, I treat each entry in my journal as a letter. Rather than having them all be letters to myself, I've had this habit of composing these entries as if they were to be letters to other people; most of them being characters from books or T.V. shows. Indeed, I have noticed, looking back at past entries up until the most recent one, that I have been getting better at my writing. Like the AP students in Yancey's article, I am improving on getting to "know how to compose . . . how to organize . . . [and] know [my] audience" (Yancey 6). I enjoy this kind of writing because I don't feel pressured, yet at the same time, I am working at improving my skills not only in the creative writing field, but in the academic field as well. (Kelsey)

Let me start off by saying I love to read and write. Writing always gave me a sense of freedom, a way to express my thoughts and not worry about being judged. (Kathy)

Writing outside of school is extremely important to me. If I only wrote for school, I would hate to write and I would feel like it was something I was being forced into doing. (Morgan)

In high school I would write poems a lot, mostly to help release what I was feeling. I don’t write them that much anymore because I no longer need that help achieving that release. (Alison)

When I was in high school my teachers would give us a list full of writing prompts. Each one was completely different than the other but they all could spark our imaginations. Each week we had to pick one prompt and write between two or three pages on it. Most students would wait till the night before it was due to write on it, but I had mine in days before hand. The list was meant to last us till the end of the school year, but before midterms came I found myself asking if my teacher had another list of prompts. When I was bored I would always go to my room and write privately. My parents didn’t know of this until my sophomore year when I applied for a writing program to London. Before high school, writing was always a job that I never wanted to do. I was always told what to write and given no freedom to explore my writing abilities until I revived the list. I always noticed that in school, students never seemed to want to write because they were told to write. There were so many guidelines that you had to fallow that made it seem like there was a right and a wrong way to do it. When that wall was broken down and teachers gave us more freedom, I noticed that not only did I start to enjoy writing, but so did my classmates. (Maria)

When I'm upset whether it be depressed or angry I turn my feelings into appropriate words to release them. In one case of writing outside of school, I wrote a short metaphorical narrative and e-mailed it to my friend who moved to New Zealand to express to him how hard the distance was. I did this unprovoked it just seemed right, how else could I get my point across? (Tara)

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Reflections on Conference Paper

I am proud that I did all of this research and competed a paper that was so long. I also didn't realize how easy it was to write it. It was one of the first papers of my college career that I actually wanted to write. I was surprised that I was actually interested in researching what I did, dance. Dance is my life; I was pretty excited about being able to write about it. (Lisa)

I am proud of the fact that I actually conducted an academic study, on a small scale. When I read previously conducted studies they seemed so complicated and academically advanced. Tackling such an intimidating project was easier than I imagined it would as it was broken down into so many pieces. I suppose that's why sub-headings are so useful, I now see that researchers use them for more than organization, but for their own references as well. I am also proud that I found an academic style of writing that isn't so cut and dry, research a topic and merely tell about it. Using research to figure out why your own surroundings are the way they are is interesting. (Tara)

What I am proud of is how I was able to adopt the persona and voice of a researcher. I provide an abstract for my paper. I use metadiscourse to explain what I am going to do in the paper. For instance, my introduction explains how I explain what is already known about the relationship between literacy and college students before talking about the case study of Desiree. I also provide sources to explain and support my findings about Desiree's experiences with literacy. (Kelsey)

In my research paper I found that I slowly grew to understand the writing and research proses needed in order to do a true study. With each draft I found I was able to think more like a scholar looking for answers rather than a student trying to get a good grade. Because studying Facebook was an area of interest to me from the start I found myself wanting to write more. (Maria)

I am mostly proud of having written a twenty page paper; I have honestly never done that, academically speaking. I have done a lot of writing in the past, mostly for myself or collaborating with friends. Inherently, I have a difficult time molding my voice to that of a ‘professional.’ The past four years of college have pissed me off just enough to fight back with my writing voice, even if it affects my grades or my teachers’ opinions of me. I took Professor Michaud’s advice into consideration, and made sure that my writing was formal; the only discretion was the subject matter itself. In a study like this, that was sparked from my own personal interest and the results of my blogging, I think it was necessary to keep my ‘voice,’ along with my ‘tongue-in-cheek’ humor. But I still sounded like a grown-up, I think. There’s still some boring stuff in there.

It’s important to note that I NEVER revise essays. One and Done Danielle, that’s what they called me in college (no, they didn’t). But seriously, revising is so irritating, but it really actually does help. It makes me realize that I’m not as smart and perfect as I think I am.... But I actually am really proud of how this came out. I can’t say that for a lot of my other college writing work. (Danielle)


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End of Term Reflections on Course Outcomes/Goals

The course has helped me look at things through the lens of Discourse communities, subsequently helping to understand the importance and function of genre, within a given community, and it's origins and audience. Understanding Discourse and genre helps to know how best to reach out to an audience, readership, or community in any situation. (Hayden)

The Research Ethnography paper, and particularly my research question, helped me to understand the importance of control and that genres bleed into each other if you're not careful. (Hayden)

I believe through reading case studies and conducting one myself I have met all six of these goals. Never before have I thought about texting as writing, or literacy. I have always been comfortable writing whether it be for academic purposes or my own and now I just support the powers of writing even more so.

After this project in particular I look at writing academic papers differently. I don't think I will ever again just research a topic and paraphrase (unless I get lazy). The research should connect to something whether it be in your own life, or a text or some other research.

I'm not sure what type of collaboration you have in mind but I believe if I was in the middle of a conversation between two academics I could hold my own concerning literacies as I have studied my own literary past as well as someone else's. I have read case studies concerning genres of writing and discourse communities and I believe I understand these concepts well.

Previous to this course I always attempted to take risks in writing papers for school. Dull, research papers are boring and so I'd try to tell a story and incorporate facts or take a different spin on the point of view. I am definitely now more comfortable doing so, I see how research can enhance a paper rather than be a burden on me.

Researching genres and discourse communities literally spelled out for me that when writing, the audience is everything. Who you are writing for should influence your language and what is said. E-mail is probably the best example; for most students e-mail teachers and friends and the differences between those audiences are clear in the body of the e-mails.

Research literacy I take to mean how and what one does with research. I believe my skills in this area have improved for I understand now that research is not just spitting out facts but evidence for claims I can make. I can apply it to my own real life and that's when it gets interesting. (Tara)

I have expanded my research literacy by completing the case study for my project. I feel this is where I have really learned about myself as a writer. While researching the community I was writing about I learned about my writing and the things that need improvement. This is basically the HOW, WHEN, WHERE question answered in one specific assignment. The in class stuff was interesting but none of it really applied to anything except this project. Putting everything together and developing the final assignment was really my ah-ha moment. (Morgan)

By the time it came to the research paper, I was getting comfortable with writing. This was thanks to the other English class that I was taking. The professor, too, was assigning a research paper and went over how to go about looking for sources. I guess you could say I was musfaking a bit, applying what I learned about navigating through JSTOR in my other English class--on top of what I was learning about Education Full Text in this class--to help find sources to put this paper together.

The paper also exposed me to research literacy of interviewing. This is something I have never done before. I have to say, it went rather well. I learned how it can be a long and dragging process; not only to conduct the interview, but to also transcribe it and filter out the information that was useful from the information that was fluff. I'm glad I was able to learn this skill because who knows: it might be proven useful in the future. (Kelsey)

I’ve learned that in order to write successfully academically, the best thing to do is write, walk away from it, and reread and edit later. For some reason, a solid 24-hour period makes you extremely more intelligent/organized than you were the day before. While writing the conference paper, I made a lot of revisions and realized how ‘shitty’ my first drafts actually were. Other times, I said ‘God Damnit, Danielle. You’re the most brilliant creature in the whole universe.’ (Danielle)

I’ve developed a clearer ‘professional tone’ to use when necessary, and learned that I need to tone down my personality in certain types of writing. It’s actually much more difficult to write when you have to remove yourself from a piece. Sometimes I don’t need to add extra comments just for a laugh; it’s not always appropriate. It’s also not always appropriate to use the F-word. But sometimes, I mean, you’ve just got to. (Danielle)

I feel that throughout the class I became able to speak like a scholar and less like a student. Mainly with the introduction of new terms such as genre, discourse community, and metadiscourse gave me more knowledge about the practice of studying writing. I found this true when writing my Facebook paper and the difference between the first and second draft. (Maria)

I cannot say that I have learned to take risks in the class with my writing. I still conform to doing what the teacher wants because whenever I take a risk, others seem to like it but the teacher does not. Though I love the idea that was taught, some ideas such as more freedom with ones writing were still not practiced in the class. Though I liked doing my paper on Facebook I truly wanted to do it on the influence of Japanese culture on the discourse community of USA Karate, reasoning for not doing it is that I felt it was not what YOU wanted. (Maria)