Joshua Ashley
Professor Crowe
Writing I
Coming into Professor Crowe’s writing course I was pretty confident in my writing, I’ve never truly done bad in any English/Writing class so I didn’t have any anxiety or feeling of failure coming into her class nor any college writing class, including speech. Her class allowed me to write how I feel, even though there were prompts and such I didn’t feel held back, or chained to having to follow everything in precise order or else it’s a failure. Which is why I think her writing class is great, and can really help students in their writing, and may even make students who dislike writing or English classes have an open mind.
On our first major assignment, the Phase 1 The Language & Literacy Narrative essay, I chose to write about my experience in high school and how that has led me to partially the man I am today. One thing I loved about that essay is how explicit I was, from calling a teacher of mine a parasite to using cuss words. Writing so explicitly in a school environment was not normal for me, I went to an all boys private catholic high school, so essays usually had to be all formal and to me lacked the writer’s true voice. I did have two English teachers who allowed my class to be a little more outgoing. Now being in college, and writing what I thought instead of paraphrasing what I thought was truly amazing. That’s just one way I’ve developed as a writer. I wish I could go back to my old high school essays and show you all but I no longer have access, or they are buried somewhere deep in the files of Google Classroom.
Our next essay was the Phase 2 Rhetorical Analysis essay, now I will admit I was a bit shaky with this one. This was when college really started to hit me and I guess I took my first steps into the so-called “real world”. But college hit me like an uppercut from Mike Tyson, never in my life would I have thought I would struggle and study and stress so much about school. High school was rough, but this? Nah this is something else. But with college comes “freedom” you can skip classes, be late, just make one friend to get the notes from and the professor will more than likely have slides. But you should be careful what classes you do that with, I would not recommend doing that with any math or science class. I tried my best not to miss too many professor Crowe classes, but unfortunately I had to take time out not just for her class but for others as well to catch up on work and studying, and because of this it resulted in an 80/100 on our second essay, now to some of you this may not be bad, but for me, someone being used to getting 95 and above on their essays I felt like I failed. But then I saw professor Crowe’s comments on how well I broke down and interpreted one of the hardest readings in class, which in all honesty I didn’t think was that hard at all, maybe because I feel I have a personal connection with June Jordan and AAVE with Patois, and that enabled me to break down the writing in my best form, if I did not rush it I definitely could have gotten higher than an 80.
Our next essay was a research paper. I chose to talk about ancestry testing since it piqued my interest, and because I already had plenty of information on it because I was also giving an informative speech on the topic. Breaking down an abundance of scientific material was not new to me, I’ve had to do it for research work I did a few years ago where I extracted DNA from Leopard scat. This was in my opinion the hardest paper of the class, I think just for me because of the long scientific article that makes your eyes hurt and your head burn. But I got through it and received at 90/100, I was happy with that grade and I expected it.
Overall I think I improved a great amount over the course of the semester, I was able to still achieve great grades and submit my work even though I couldn’t be there all the time. I think everyone should take an intensive writing course like this at least once in their life. I think it’ll really challenge them and improve their writing skills, informative skills, interpretation skills, and critical thinking skills.
But one thing that has not improved for me this semester and during class, is time. I am still horrible with my time, as I type this essay a day before the deadline even though we were given this weeks ago! For those who read this please use your time wisely, you have more time than you think you just have to utilize it the right way and you’ll be surprised what you get down. I hope to take my own advice and utilize my time correctly, even though it may feel like we have a lot of time we really don’t, so we have to make use of what we have so we not only get good grades, but accomplish our goals, to just feel better about ourselves.
To conclude my assessment and rant, this is the first time in my life I feel that I’ve actually taken something from an English/Writing course. I feel like I walked away more knowledgeable and more confident in my work. It’s probably because our main coursework wasn’t only reading Shakespere and The Odyssey all year long, and not learning how to express ourselves in writing, or being able to express ourselves more and being told how to express ourselves correctly so your writing can be so much more meaningful, more eye-catching.
So thank you professor Crowe.