Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Final Reflection
Final Reflection
Final Reflection
Professor Hollinger
7/10/2022
Final Reflection
I won’t sit here and type up an essay of fluff and lies just to try and get a better grade. I
won’t say that I feel as though this class has improved my writing game ten-fold. I won’t tell you
that this class has changed the way I see literature forever. I will tell you, however, that after
what feels like one of the quickest semesters of my life, I feel as though this class has somehow
had a more positive impact on my abilities as a researcher than all my previous classes
combined.
Usually, when assigning a research paper, teachers and professors will give students a
narrow prompt with strict criteria regarding what they can include in their paper. Some will go as
far as to specify how many paragraphs the student should write about each sub-topic, putting the
student into a situation where they are practically following a cooking recipe to bake an essay
that is almost identical to all of the other students’ essays, since the prompt might as well be a
cookie-cutter. I have always been opposed to these styles of assignments, as I believe that they
discourage creative thinking and, more importantly, elude the interest of students. This results in
poorly conducted research, sloppy writing, and the formation of bad researching and writing
habits. I’ve never entirely understood why teachers choose these types of writing prompts.
Maybe it’s to teach that you’re not always going to be interested in what you’re writing about.
Maybe it’s because the school’s curriculum doesn’t allow for creativity. Maybe it’s just easier to
grade that way. Whatever the case is, I always appreciate having a somewhat broad prompt, so
that I get to choose some aspects of what I’m writing about. Assignments become much easier
when you’re interested in what you are writing about because you’re not just researching for an
All of this is not to say that this is my first assignment with a broad prompt. I’ve had
broad prompts in the past. This is, however, one of the few times that I’m genuinely interested in
the topic I have chosen; I’ve always been interested in technology and its effects on literacy. As
an individual who learned to type almost entirely by playing RuneScape, I chose my topic
already going into the assignment with a pre-formed hypothesis. When reading through my
sources, I was reading with genuine curiosity, which meant that I was genuinely learning about
my topic. Because of this, while I was composing my paper, I already knew which source and
were where within each source to look through to find the information I needed.
To conclude, while I may not have learned too much about writing, I did learn a good bit
about researching, and even picked up a few good researching habits (Like highlighting useful
information. It seems like something obvious, but I’ve never really thought to do it before now).
I’m always grateful to get a broad prompt, and I’m sure that I can apply much of what I learned