Daniel Florez

As I sit here thinking how quickly time has flown by, I also start to realize the vast amounts of knowledge I have gained.  Initially, I had always seen writing as nothing but torture.  I detested writing with a passion, and now I find it quite fascinating how much I have grown as a writer.

 

By reexamining and reviewing all the pieces I have written in this course I found that on my first day book entry, I had finally come through to rationalizing why I loathed writing so much.  Seeing it now, I find it ironic that writing itself was the means to help me break through this fear.  I also see how profoundly my professor had made a difference to seeing this fear as irrational, through her feedback on our writing and also through various reading excerpts and exercises we did throughout the semester.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first reading, which I found to have made an enormous impact, was “How to Write with Style” by Kurt Vonnegut.  I see this reading as the first step to how my writing has changed.  It helped me develop my own style of writing and also to become more confident in expressing exactly how I feel about a subject.  Being confident in any of my work, especially writing, has always been hard for me, however I found that Lammot’s “Shitty First Drafts” had a bigger impact in becoming a self-assured writer.  I also progressed as a writer by breaking habits such as trying to sound as eloquent as possible rather than getting my ideas out.  Although, these were the foundation to my writing I eventually progressed by also exploring and comprehending what writing can do. 

 

Throughout the class we had many discussions to open our minds.  Early on in the class we had a discussion about what literacy really is.  This concept being literate on something that is not reading or writing related completely gave me a new perspective and broadened my ways of thinking.  These discussions also changed my perspective on the class as a whole.  I saw how different and unique this class was.  Ms. Andrews really pushed us to become better writers by simply letting us say what we needed to say.  We would learn a lot through each other through discussions and also by peer reviews.  Peer reviews helped me revise other’s papers and most importantly my own as a reader and not a writing.  Paying more attention to content rather than structure helped tremendously in making papers easier to write but also to become more passionate about them.

 

I faced many challenges and impediments throughout this class, especially in the beginning of it.  There are several factors to why this might have been such as how bad I have always been at writing.  Perhaps it was because I had a different mindset to how an English college course would be.  I had always imagined that it would be the hardest and most hated class I would take throughout my college career.  This class however ended up being one of my favorites.  Similarly I had a different mentality on the power of writing.  I found out the impact that writing could have when studying rhetoric.  Although it was a hard concept to grasp at first, I found it much easier when I read the graphic chapter on it.  This led me and the class as a whole to be able to see several techniques used to persuade and compose strong pieces in not only writing but in almost every aspect of our every day lives that we are exposed to.  We were able to fully comprehend the several aspects of rhetoric.  The most important ones being: ethos, pathos logos.  After fully grasping the concept we were able to break down how to compose these strong pieces such as the Muppets Fox News segment.

 

Being able to break down things we see in our every day lives as simple as commercials became my favorite portion of the class.  This was because now that we were able to break these components down meant that we could compose pieces as strong as these to appeal to our audience.  An example of how we incorporated these rhetorical devices in our own pieces was the cooperative visual argument analysis.  This piece is also an epitome to how flexible this class was.  Ms. Andrews let us chose whatever topic we would want to work on as long as it incorporated what we learned.  I found this to be the best part of this class because it was one contributing factor how much I grew as a writer.  It was my outlet to truly writing because I was passionate on the subject and not to simply get a grade.  Incorporating what I learned on pieces that I was deeply passionate about, was the means through which everything I learned became engraved in my mind.

 

This flexibility in choosing our own topics easily became the biggest reasons why I started to view writing differently.  Throughout my whole life I detested writing but now I see that it wasn’t only the fear of not being good enough.  It was the constant pressure of writing on topics I could care less about.  Topics that were of no use to me.  Being able to express exactly how I felt on a subject made me forget about structure, but most importantly forget about word count.

 

Thanks to my wonderful professor I overcame the fear of writing to impress.  I can now honestly say that I am even fond of writing.  A few months back I would’ve struggled to say that previous statement.  However, it wasn’t time that changed my perspective on writing, it was various factors that contributed to my change on the view of it and also on my growth as a writer.  All these factors you will able to see in my portfolio.  Moreover, you will also see how much I developed throughout the semester.  I became a much stronger writer by developing my own style, saying exactly what I needed to say, and being a credible writer by using rhetorical devices.  Most importantly I became the writer that I am today and will continue to be from this point on thanks to the most amazing English professor that I’ve had and ever will have.  So I leave you with the most important lesson I learned from this class:  Don’t let fear stop you from becoming the greatest human that you can be.

 

 

 

Ever since I enrolled in college I’ve always had this stereotype or single story of professors not giving a single care in their world about their students.  Ms. Andrews completely changed my perspective on this mentality.  I see now how much she intended us to grow and develop as writers.  I admire her so much for succeeding in doing this to a person that had simply given up so long ago.  I know I am not a perfect writer now and I will continue to make mistakes.  But now I don’t see mistakes as an obstruction but rather more things to grow on.  Growth is what we all live on, some grow faster than others, but growing is something we can’t stop doing.  Thank you, Kendra Andrews, for showing me that it isn’t a dead end and showing me that I can still continue to grow.