I believe that throughout this semester I have been able to grow as a writer however I think more specifically I have been able to to grow the way I use different styles of evidence and analyze that evidence. In both project 1 and 2 I needed to use a variety of evidence from articles to video and movies which was something that I actually found quite helpful because I was able to see how each of these sources helped the point I was driving. This aspect of my writing is something I see being used in other classes because I think it is important to have multiple mediums of sources instead of just a ton of articles that all say the same things. The fact that I now am able to use more types of evidence gives me a new goal which is to work on how I set up this evidence in my writing because sometimes I find myself just throwing evidence in without really explaining the background of the information in the evidence.
One piece of work that I felt I did well on was project one which was the rhetorical analysis essay which compared and contrasted the Black Panther Party and Black Lives Matter. I thought that in this essay I was able to use different sources like a movie, articles and scholarly sources to convey the similarities of the two groups and the opposition they received. At first I thought that gathering the evidence would be hard which is why I had to look outside of just articles for my evidence and once I got the right amount it felt like I was almost in a flow state when writing this essay because I felt like I was able to finish it very smoothly. I think when reading it some of the essay may seem to have bias or it may seem like I am arguing a point, but I also think that is how my writing style has developed because I tend to want to push the meaning of my evidence to more than just words between quotes and this sometimes makes it seem biased.
A piece of work that I had a challenging time with was probably project 2 which was the research based argument essay about gender bias in Wikipedia. This issue that I had was not with the topic of gathering the evidence because I felt like that part of the essay came to me relatively easy however it was the writing process and putting my thoughts out that I felt I struggled with. A big aspect to why I struggled was because I put away the essay for a while and would sometimes write something and then not go back to it for a couple of days which caused me to lose a lot of the ideas I was trying to push. I also think that I should have used a few more days to explore Wikipedia because I only used it for a few days and then I started writing my essay and didn’t really use it for anything other than evidence after that. Although I struggled I think that this has helped me see what kind of space I need to be in to write effectively. I can’t be rushing to write or taking long breaks in between my writing, I need to really be focused on the topic to be “in the zone” when writing.