Kenneth McIntyre

Professor Kennia Lopez

Composition II

December 18th, 2023

Composition II Reflection

During this last semester of college, I had the honor of taking Composition II with

Professor Kennia Lopez. Although this course is part of my general education requirement at

UNM, I found myself using quite a lot of what was being taught outside of the class. This

opportunity has shown me how to use my own voice better in writing by using rhetoric, how to

approach a new writing piece before actually putting words on the page, and how research can

improve my writing.

The very first assignment in the semester was a personal narrative. I can, without a doubt,

say this was the most difficult assignment for me. I had a very hard time making the essay

focused on myself and scratched a lot of ideas. I remember the first three or four tries at

structuring the essay was by reviewing the Steely Dan album Aja, which is a personal favorite of

mine. What didn’t work with that structure was that I spent a majority of the paper reviewing the

album rather than using it as a means to explore my personal relationship with music. So I

pivoted. I instead wrote about Douglas Kenny, and used his own life as a means to reflect on my

own relationship with writing. This assignment I truly believe the essay that resulted from this is

one of my strongest pieces to date. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep that hot steak very long.

Around the time the second assignment was being introduced, I was working on my very

first feature length script. I thought multitasking would have been easy, but I ended up with

tunnel vision with the feature. Because of that, a lot of my other projects slipped in quality.
Which brings me to my essay on Steely Dan. For a lot of reasons, it was significantly weaker

than my personal narrative. I ended up learning a lot about the research process for this

assignment, specifically confirming facts. I didn’t know it when I chose my subject, but there is a

freakishly large amount of myths about Steely Dan. Specifically, the lengths they went for studio

perfectionism. While I learned how to confirm my sources, I had a difficult time doing it in a

timely manner due to how much of a time restraint I put myself in. I did, however, learn from my

mistake for the expose assignment.

The final assignment was my favorite to write. It gave me a lot of room to push how I use

humor in a piece that had something to say. I approached this project differently from the rest. I

thought about my structure and flow over any other writing technique for this project. Due to the

amount of research I did and how many raw facts I wanted to cover, it was important for me to

write in a voice that was easy to listen to. So I recorded voice memos for inspiration. Every new

fact, interview, or perspective I came up with, I would talk into my microphone and record it in a

way that I might talk in conversation. This made it very easy to start plopping words on pages

when I started working on my rough draft. There were a few issues with this method, however. I

had hours of voice memos to sift through due to how many different ways I approached every

fact. It added quite a lot of time to the writing process. Another issue I ran into was the length. I

normally have no issues writing long. I believe it to be one of my few gifts, but by using a

‘talking’ voice, I found my paper being very streamlined and short. I ended up proposing some

possible solutions to lengthen the expose at the last second. This addition may have weakened

the overall assignment, but was crucial to meet the requirements.

 Overall, Composition II was one of my strongest classes this semester. I feel that I

learned a lot of valuable techniques and have strengthened my academic writing as a whole. I’m

hoping to begin using these techniques in my creative writing for the future.