Final Reflection

I came into this class with a lot of confidence in my writing as I had gotten a five on my AP Lang exam and gotten an A dual enrolling in ENC 1101 at my local community college. Little did I know that ENC 2135 would challenge me, knock me off my perch of confidence yet allow me to grow as a writer and a student. Early on in Project One I was very confident as I thought I understood the assignment well. I wrote the first draft with no issues and thought my work was satisfactory. Upon meeting with Mat, I realized that some slight changes were needed. Mat explained to me that he really wanted me to put an emphasis on the personal part of the personal narrative. My strong suit has never really been creative writing as much as it was writing black and white research papers. I resorted to doing what I was good at when drafting Project One and it wasn’t personal or creative enough. Mat was able to get this message across to me in our conference and because of that I knew what to do to fix my mistakes. I went back to the drawing board and enriched my initial draft with more personal detail about my family and even included a picture of a family artifact. Mat’s clear feedback helped me out a lot as I ended up receiving a 99% on my final draft. Whereas Project 1 was relatively straightforward, Project 2 proved to be a real challenge for me. From the start, I had a feeling of uncertainty but never really addressed it before writing my draft. The thousand-word first draft wasn’t too bad as it played to my forte of research paper writing. I wrote this draft as a research paper proving that veteran unemployment. After writing this draft I had my conference with Mat and he was very happy with the first thousand words. We also discussed the direction of the paper from there. Mat suggested that I write the rest of the paper focusing on explaining how joining STEM Veterans USA was a worthwhile task for a college student. As I wrote the next thousand words of the essay, I felt as if the writing was disjointed and wasn’t working but kept going in hopes that it would eventually tie in and create a cohesive essay. Upon turning in my essay and getting my grade back, my fears were realized. I received a 65% as Mat said that my analyzation of my text wasn’t satisfactory. I immediately set a time to have a revision conference with Mat. At this conference Mat and I discussed what had went wrong in my paper. Mat reiterated my concerns, agreeing that the direction that we had agreed on in the previous conference didn’t work out the way either of us thought it would. As such, we agreed that scrapping the second half of the essay and re-writing it was the best option. I did so that very same day and re-submitted it, receiving a 77%. Mat again gave me some feedback and I revised the essay again, this time receiving a 90%. After this long journey, I decided to settle for a 90% and call it a day. At the revision conference, Mat and I also talked about Project 3 as well. I initially had a plan for Project 3 that centered on fundraising for STEM Veterans USA but Mat said that this would be a perfect opportunity to use the idea that we had for Project 2. So I ran with it and created a composition of three genres: a clickbait article, Facebook posts, and a resume entry that focused on recruiting college students to work as interns at STEM Veterans USA. I presented my project in class on Monday, December 4, 2017 and Mat gave me a 100%. All in all, ENC 2135 was a class that was challenging yet rewarding. Mat did a good job of giving insightful feedback that helped me improve my writing. I feel that this class helped me grow as a writer in many ways which will have a great impact on the rest of my time in college.