From my own experience, the writing for this semester is completely different compared to the English T class from last semester. The biggest change is the topic and tone of the essay changes from focusing on narrative to a more research and academic tone, which is something I am struggling with for a long time. Lack of confidence is one of my big problems in writing, I often worry about if I am structuring my essay correctly, such as if my evidence fits my argument, or how my general tone is presented to the audience. Professors often say that college essays had much more freedom compared to high school writing, in which students are asked to jump out from writing in the immobilized outline. The meaning of freedom in writing is different for people like me, it meant I’m more likely to lose my focus in writing. This semester is different, the professor explained the brought argument of the writing topic and left a big room for students to develop their own individualized arguments. I still lack confidence in writing, but the professor’s advice and recognition greatly encouraged me in writing. If you ask me what I learned this semester, I would say the importance of confidence in writing.
I was satisfied with the outcome of this semester. Especially for the last remix project where we are asked to recreate the previous two projects on Black Panther Party or Wikipedia gender bias into the medium piece. My group decided on the podcast as our medium to perform to audiences, which is something I have never tried before. The time we spent on learning new things is way more than the time we actually spent on doing our project. The challenge and the outcome were equivalent, the more we struggled on producing it, the more satisfaction we felt when we heard the professor appreciating our work. But even so, I still believe that there is a big room for improvement.
There are challenges throughout this semester, it’s hard for me to transaction from writing narrative essays to academic-based research essays. Especially when I have no prior knowledge of the research topic, such as the Wikipedia gender bias. The research process for gender bias issues and women in red on Wikipedia is where I struggled the most. My experience with Wikipedia before is only based on research, which means I had never opened the discussion section nor accessed any of Wikipedia’s functions other than simply looking at an individual Wikipedia page for a certain subject. Scamming through the discussion section is a new experience for me, it’s like understanding something completely new to me. It’s also hard for me to determine rather or not a page contains biased wording, I’m lack of understanding of how would a gender bias performed on a page. On the other hand, I realized that I am admitting to the fact that the bias problem is surely fixed before I found them subconsciously.
I really appreciate the encouragement and knowledge I learned this semester, Thank you a lot, Professor Perry!!!
