Gabe Atkinson

Reflection on Semester
RC 2001-107

This semester I have learned a lot about myself as a writer. I began thinking that I knew
how to write a paper and that this class would be a breeze, but I soon found out that not only was
I mistaken, but that I was going to need to be very flexible. One of the first things that I figured
out was that writing was not all about writing papers. Writing was about understanding how to
write in all forms of media and how to pass on this knowledge to others. Enter the first project
that we did as a class, the academic community discourse assignment. For this project I needed
to figure out how the academic history community passed on knowledge to one another and how
they made themselves heard. I learned a lot from the series of interviews that I conducted and
then from piecing together the responses that I got into a coherent report. I gained lots of
knowledge on what my future looked like, and the direction of the history community. One of
my goals for the class after this project was to be more open and to desire to learn about other
forms of writing, rather than just long history papers.
When I first read the instructions for the op-ed project I was confused and honestly, a
little frustrated. I had no clue as to how I was going to mesh history and sustainability into a
coherent project and I didn’t want to even think about it. However, the more I worked on the
project, and the more I learned about opinion pieces, the more open I became to actually
finishing and being proud of what I had completed. By the end of the project, I had an article that
combined history, personal experiences, and a lesson about sustainability into a coherent article
that I was pleased to put my name on. All I had to do was open up to different forms of writing
and different styles and I could actually accomplish something. The more I think about this
semester, the more that this lesson becomes the major lesson that I’ll be taking away. I need to
open myself more to different styles of writing and genre and I should find myself writing more
and enjoying what I’m doing.
Some of the goals that I now have as I begin my junior year and really begin diving into
the world of writing and processing research is that I want to start writing in different writing
styles and finding my voice on the page. I want to find a style that works best for me and that
helps me get what I want to say on the page as smoothly as possible. I look forward to wiring
more (which is something I never thought I’d say) in order to develop and refine this voice that I
anticipate coming out. I can definitely see myself writing papers as a history professor or
researcher at an archive and using this style to help me write quickly and efficiently.
One of the challenges that I definitely had this semester was my ability to sit and write in
one session. I found myself writing in short bursts and having to stretch out assignments longer
than they needed to be. For example, instead of writing a two page paper in one sitting over the
weekend, I would have to start Thursday or Friday in order to get the entire assignment written.
One of the biggest problems with this writing style is that things don’t flow very smoothly
because it wasn’t all written in the same thought process or frame of mind, and this can throw
things off. I want to work on being able to write more in one sitting, in order to be efficient and
more coherent in my papers. I think that this should come naturally as I write more in college
and develop better writing habits, but it’s definitely something that I want to focus on.
 This semester has absolutely been beneficial to me as a writer and it’s given me goals to
reach and things to think about. I enjoyed doing projects that expanded my frame of reference
when thinking about what it means to write and my attitudes towards being a writer. I look
forward to where I go as a writer in the future and can’t wait to see where these skills will take
me.