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Cristian Espinoza
Professor Bladl
UWRT 1101
December 9, 2016

Final Reflection
In the beginning of this course I was very nervous. Although I have taken many English
courses throughout my literacy journey, I did not know what to expect from this course because
this semester was the first of my college career. I expected this course to be very difficult for me
because reading and writing are not one of my top interests. Since reading and writing are not a
part of my interest I find it hard for me to focus when I am reading or writing. I expected to work
more on my grammar in this class and to create a foundation for future writing courses. I
expected this course to make me a better writer. In my first journal entry I also wrote that I also
wanted to get to know the people in the class better because that is one of the reasons that I came
to UNC Charlotte. I did not expect to learn about literacy. Towards the middle of the semester I
realized that this class has really been eye opening and has made me think about that I had never
thought about. One of the things that this class has helped me reflect on is my literacy journey. I
had never reflected on what literacy was and this class has helped me do that and it helped me
learn what literacy truly is. I learned that there are many factors that affect peoples literacy
journey. I learned that there are things like gender, age, race, and sometimes location factor into
how the person becomes literate. Before this class I did not know what rhetoric was. This class
taught me what rhetoric is and it also taught me about how people use rhetoric for persuasion by

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using ethos, logos, and pathos. Today reflecting on the whole semester, I can say that I learned
how to write a whole novel in six words. The six word memoir taught me that word choice plays
an important role when writing any paper.
One of my favorite things about the class was the discussions because I like to hear what
people have to say about different topics. I learned that you do not have to be a professional
writer to consider yourself a writer. I never considered how much reading and writing each
person does on a daily basis. Today almost everyone communicates via text or email but not very
many people consider them forms of writing or readings. People spend most of their day staring
down at a phone screen reading tweets or snapchats but yet dont consider themselves to be
readers or writers and I am one of those people. I although I do visit twitter and read tweets and I
also communicate with my friends through snapchat and text messages I feel that I do not do
enough reading and writing to consider myself a reader or writer. Although I think this about
myself in the discussion section some of my class mates consider themselves now readers or
writers since they probably spend more time on twitter or snapchat than I do. I did learn a lot in
this class but one of the things that I did not enjoy doing was the small reader responses. I do not
like the reader responses because I did not enjoy most of the readings and because of this it was
hard to concentrate on the reading then write about them. I do think that they are helpful though
because it prepares the student for the discussion on the next day. Overall the class was very
enjoyable and I am very happy that I got to participate in it and I am also glad that I met the great
people in the class.