I have finally learned how to create effective outlines! Making outline for my genre project helped streamline my thought process and writing style to a great extent.
|
English 2089 (Honors)
I vividly remember walking into the class of English 2089 for the first time and wondering how an “honors” English course was going to be different from a regular English course. It soon became clear that this class was going to be more interesting and challenging than I had thought. I think it was really helpful to initially discuss and learn about genres before working on our projects. Also, due to the initial summary writing exercises and analysis of narratives, I was able to put myself into a writer’s shoes and effectively think about my subject and audience. This helped me narrow down my vast topic of black holes for the genre project by addressing important questions like why should my reader care about this topic? What can the perspectives of various communities help me understand about black holes? Which genre would be best suitable for my topic, given the complexity of my topic? Similarly, in our community project, we had to create a parent's guide for the Granny's Garden School program and so we began by writing questions about GG School that we thought parents would be interested to learn about. Again, I was taught the importance of changing my perspective as a writer to a reader and vice-versa. Also, I soon realized that both the projects we worked on needed the same strategies. For GG project, we gathered a lot of information, wrote our own FAQs from the perspective of our intended audience who were parents, created an outline and then a draft. This was essentially the same process that was used for the genre project. Working on both projects was an interesting experience as we worked on different genres in similar ways. Experiencing this twist of genres in our three hour class was an interesting and fun experience since it required us to put our different thinking caps on. One of the many lessons that I have learned from this class is about the importance of involving perspectives of different communities in discussions and ideas. For example, not all communities might share the same views with me, but discussing about them gives a holistic view about the topic and addresses the audience’s concerns more reasonably. My writing style has mostly intended to give an optimistic and a motivating view on a topic which I learned is not always necessary. As much as I loved discussing about black holes study benefits, I learned that my readers need to know that there is still a long way to go and a lot more efforts to be put. I am glad that I chose the topic of black holes study for my project since it really challenged every bit of me as a writer. I cannot think of any other class in which I worked as hard as I did in this class and also learned and enjoyed so much at the same time. Now that I have been reflecting about my experience, I am filled with amazement for the things I have learned-- from making a guide for a client organization to working as a team with other like-minded, bright honors students! It has indeed been an enriching and a memorable honors experience. |