English 2089 Intermediate Composition is a class that is required by the School of IT to

complete my degree in IT. From my point of view, this class’s theme was understanding

audience and how that influences how our communication is perceived. Many assignments

asked us to think about our audience and how they will perceive what is being delivered to

them. I found this topic interesting as it made me think more about how I talk to people that

disagree with me. It is not satisfiable that you simply say the words you want the other person

to hear. You must anticipate how the person will take those words and bend them in a way that

fits what they will understand.

Looking over the course objectives for this course, I can say that I did meet most of the

objectives even with my sparse attendance in the course. I was able to understand and analyze

a discourse community. I did not know what a discourse community was before I started this

class, but I can now see they are everywhere, and I interact with them all the time. One

objective that I failed to meet was developing skills in editing. I was given many opportunities in

the course for this though.

I was apathetic to taking this class originally. As I learned that the topic would be

developing skills in understanding audience, I became more interested. My expectations for the

class were broken as I found myself enjoying the topics and developing skills that I like to use

every day. In the first unit, we worked on writing reading journals for nature writing. I was

surprised at how much I was enjoying the readings and I found myself even criticizing some of

the writings, thinking of how they could be better. In the same unit we were set up in groups to

reflect and advertise some of these writings. This helped me get more into the course since I

had others to rely on me.

 Critical thinking is something that I have focused on developing throughout my life and

this class helped me discover something that I had overlooked. The class has made me more

perceptive when reading and I find myself enjoying reading articles more now because of it.

Interacting with others has changed as well as I am more focused on developing what I do and

say to fit the people I am interacting with.

Since this is my final class before I graduate, I will not be taking these skills to classes

soon. I do work full time and I will use these skills in my work. Since I work in IT, I must interact

with users every day. Developing writing skills to interact with these users is important and I

will take the skills I learned in this course into that work. A good example for this would be

trying to explain how an operating system works to a user. Most are not tech savvy and need

more refined communication to get what I want across to them.

I was pleasantly surprised by taking this class and it was a wonderful class to end my

school career with. In a less stressful time, I would have been much more engaged. I am

disappointed that I did not have the ability to do that.