Yonas Ambaye

6/7/15
ENG 101
Shannon Kelly

Retrospective prospective
Writing is not something we learn once and for all. As writers, we are always
developing and expanding our abilities to write for different purposes, audiences, and
contexts. High School writing classes are not intended to replace college-writing classes,
but to prepare students for further learning. English 101 is required not because students
don't know how to write, but because there is much more to learn about writing in a
university format. Furthermore, because of the individual attention students receive,
English 101 course is able to help all students increase their knowledge and proficiency,
no matter what their prior experience with writing is. Coming into English 101, I thought
of it as constantly typing essays and analyzing dense reading. I was very hesitant to take
this course due to my writing ability. Ive never been a great writer and thought that I
could not last but after taking this course, it was a different story. We analyzed readings
and learned about interesting things such as discourses, spaces, genres and much more.
Although my writing skills werent great, I enjoyed doing work in this class. In this paper
I will be talking about some of the work we have been doing in the past 10 weeks. We
looked over many authors essays however we mainly focused on 3 in particular; Paul
Heilker, James Paul Gee and Kathleen Blake Yancey which played a huge role towards
my learning in our English 101 class. I focused on these three authors specifically
because they are written to respond to and extends the conversations in academic

communities of various kinds. In our first essay draft we had the opportunity to bring
Heilker into our conversations. As we moved onto our second essay draft we then
extended our conversation and added Gee who talked about affinity spaces, and we also
incorporated Yancy and her work into our draft. My presentation essay will portray a lot
of Heilkers work because I felt confortable with his theory of genre and my space the
ESC. In the past 10 weeks, I never thought I would learn so much in such a short time
span. This was just a short summary of what my class did, to be brief about other things
we learned, we were taught how to write consistently, received feedback on our writing
and give feedback to others, engage with challenging readings, and putting others ideas
in conversation with our own. This class is not all about typing essays every day, we had
discussions more than we did typing essays. Of course you have to write essays but they
werent based on boring topics, they were interesting to examine and discuss about and
had a even complexity to them. After these 10 weeks of class, I could say that I have
grown as a better writer and gained more knowledge prior to taking this class.