Josh Benton

UWRT 1101

Midterm Reflection

Before beginning this UWRT 1101 course, I had always thought of myself as a strong writer.
At first I didnt understand how I didnt get place into a higher level course such as UWRT 1103
like most of my friends. I originally wanted to be in that course instead because that means I
would only have to take one writing class as opposed to two classes. I still wish that I only had to
take that one course, but now I think that having two courses instead will help me out
significantly when it comes to learning how to write different types of papers, particularly for
engineering. Now that I have been in this class for a while, I am beginning to realize that there
are certain aspects of my writing that I can improve on significantly. The peer review was
something that we have done that I have previously never experience. It gives me a different
perspective about how I can improve my paper, just from a point of view similar to my own. I
also think its good to see peers who are a similar writing level as myself that I can relate with so
we can help each other out.
I do, however, think that I have grown a little bit as a writer since starting this course. One
reason for this would be the rhetorical analysis essay we completed a couple of weeks ago. I had
never had experience with this topic, especially writing a paper in this fashion. College in
general has introduced me to different types of writing I never thought I would have to use. My
first encounter with this would have to be in my engineering class last semester when I had to
write a passive voice report. This was something that I struggled with at first, but soon got used
to after a while. I never knew that I could write like this and get a good grade on it none the less.
These new styles of writing have made me more confident in my writing abilities as a whole
because now I feel as if I can do a good job writing any type of paper. Even though I had to write
papers like these before taking this class, I feel that next time I write them I can do an even better
job on them and use the resources Ive learned in this class as a foundation for my next papers.
So far in this class, I believe I have learned the most about rhetoric and rhetorical analysis.
Everything else that we have worked on is familiar to me and is at most a good refresher from
previous classes in high school. Even though we have worked quite a bit with rhetorical analysis,
I still believe that I am not grasping the whole concept and havent mastered the idea itself. This
is something that I would definitely like to work more on in the future. I still believe that the peer
reviews have been the most helpful activities we have done so far. One thing that I feel has been
a little redundant has been the discussion assignments we have due almost every class. Most of
the time I complete these assignments, I dont fully understand what they mean until we discuss
it in class. This makes me a little unmotivated to complete them before class. If we learned about
the topic and then did an assignment on the topic, I feel as if I would do a better job on the
assignment as well as more motivated to do it in the first place. This would help my grade
immensely due to the fact that my bad grades are just zeroes from discussion assignments I am
simply unmotivated to do. That is my best way of explaining how this semester is going as a
whole.