About

Outcomes / Final Course Reflection

Generating Inquiry - Students will be able to generate and explore genuine lines of inquiry related to writing, language, literacy, and/or rhetoric.

Throughout the course, I had a few chances to generate inquiry with the reader. I think that the assignment that really showed my ability to generate inquiry the most was my second major project when I shared the properties of a discourse community. When I was near the end of my revision process for the first draft of this project, I noticed that I was forcing the words of Swale to fit my community. When I realized how that discredited my argument, I rewrote the project on my third draft. In this final draft, instead of telling my readers why my community fit in the definitions that Swale had made, I challenged the definitions, and attempted to spark questions about the prompt in the reader as they engaged. I believe that I was able to build not only my argument in this project, but also a compelling question for the readers to answer: "Do Swale's definitions still apply?"

Multiple Ways of writing: Students will be able to purposefully integrate multimodality, multiple languages, and or multiliteracies into writing products to support their goals.

This outcome was difficult to reach in my Major Projects, as I feel like adding other modes of communication would have brought down the meaningfulness my personal arguments (If i wasn't able to make those other modes just as meaningful.) Instead, I found the best way to achieve this outcome was to build each of my major projects in different literary styles with dynamic conventions, and bring them together in my ePortfolio. By separating each mode of communication between projects, I was able to keep my writing consistent with the rest of the writing in that project, while still having contrast with my other responses.

Information Literacy: Students will be able to evaluate and act on criteria for relevance, credibility, and ethics when gathering, analyzing, and presenting primary and secondary source materials.

This outcome was one of the easiest for me to achieve in this course, as it was an inherit step to completing the second major project. Evaluating the credibility and relevance is not difficult if you already have bounds for the scope of your project, and the structure of the second major project made those bounds very clear. Apart from the class time, and the workshop regarding the gathering of sources and other materials, finding and presenting sources in my project was the first step in its creation.

Research Genre Production: Students will be able to produce writing that demonstrates their ability to navigate choices and constraints in a variety of public and/or academic research genres that matter to specific communities.

While this outcome was achieved in my second major project, I believe that my third major project; "Letter to a future student" has a better reflection of this outcome. In all of my projects I had to make choices on what to include, how I should reference ideas, and how to best portray my idea to my intended audience. For my third major project, this is especially true. I had a few references in my third project, all being previous projects I had completed. For every detail of every argument I made in that letter, I needed to find which of those references would best fit. Finding the right fit ensured that I had a well established line of reasoning for the reader (which proved very important in a letter) and a strong connection between my claims and my evidence.

Contributing Knowledge: Students will be able to draw conclusions based on analysis and interpretation of primary evidence and place that work in conversation with other source materials.

This outcome was best reflected by my First Major Project; "Portrait of a Writer." In this project, all of my claims had reference to my personal experiences. However, simply referencing these experiences without backing them up with other materials made my claims unreliable. Thus, in my next draft, I referenced Lamott and Cisneros to back up my experiences, and form effective claims. In response to the Lamott text, I was able to take her recommendations on the drafting process and use it in my First Major Project, setting a standard for the rest of the semester.

Revision: Students will be able to negotiate differences in and act with intention on feedback from readers when drafting, revising, and editing their writing.

This outcome was another simple one, being referenced in every one of the major projects. However, the First Major Project uses the Revision process the most, relying on the process not only for the completion of the project, but for the content referenced in it as well. In my First Major Project, I state how my reasons for writing, methods of writing, and effectiveness of writing has changed throughout my life. During this explanation, I explain how the drafting process, similar to the process explained in the Lamott text allowed me to develop my abilities to write for myself. This didn't mean that my project was perfect the first time, and even though the narration was very personal, it was easy to take constructive criticism and develop the project with revisions because of the feedback I got from the class, and in some ways Lamott.

Artifacts

Mini Project: Writer's Log and Reflection

Activities: Reader Response

Major Projects 1-3