Reflection

        Throughout high school, I was used to taking AP English courses that hindered my creative writing process. Because the essays were so structured around analyzing rhetorical strategies, I felt that there wasn’t much room for originality. I have always been a perfectionist; therefore, this caused me to dread writing assignments as I never felt satisfied with my work. Overall, I struggled to get my words out on paper. This was largely because of my lack of knowledge in how to properly plan out an essay. Up until ENC2135, I never planned out essays, even when the teacher required it. I felt that there was no difference in my writing with the use of a planning sheet vs no planning sheet. Instead, I would just sit down and jot everything down on my paper in one sitting, leading to an unorganized structure and a lack of confidence in my work. 

        Throughout ENC2135, Professor Rodriguez has designed our projects to be broken up into separate assignments with a heavy emphasis on planning. For example, the investigative essay project was preceded by a mind mapping assignment to brainstorm all of our ideas for our essay topic. This strategy was the most effective for me because it didn’t require any writing, just words in bubbles. It was the first time I understood the importance of planning. When writing a 2000-word essay, one must strategize the organization and goal of their essay to make it easy to comprehend for the readers. This class taught me how to use my research to carefully design a well-written analysis of my findings. Not only was this class helpful in discovering how to plan, but it also taught me the importance of editing multiple drafts until I made the finished product. My “shitty first draft” started off weak, but with peer review and post-conference draft notes, I was able to take the perspectives of others to polish my final draft. When producing any work, it is always best to acknowledge the views of others, as they provide a point of view that maybe the writer failed to see. Project 2 was also instrumental in my learning process because it emphasized the importance of tailoring one’s work to their audiences’ values.

        In the future, I plan to use all of these writing strategies to my advantage. As a public health major, I expect to write many papers on a variety of aspects in healthcare. This will require extensive research and planning in order to properly execute them. Furthermore, ENC2135 has prepared me well for my future in writing as it taught me the importance of planning, drafting, and acknowledging your audience’s values when deciding on style, genre, and rhetoric.