Reflection Essay

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During the course of the semester, the primary purpose of English 1102 has been to improve my communication skills – from becoming more confident in my ability to present ideas to learning to present those ideas in a variety of different ways. Coming into the class, I knew that my biggest weakness was taking multiple fleshed out ideas and combining them into one organized and cohesive argument. In the past, writing more complex essays has always been a challenge as I struggle to find one solid motiving claim to guide the paper. This always meant I would spend significant amounts of time editing, slowing down the writing process. With the common first week video, I realized that with the quick turnaround of most assignments I would have to focus on remedying my weakness in order to be successful in the class and complete assignments in a timely manner. Throughout the semester, this class has taught me the importance of the drafting process and the use of various process documents to help organize arguments as well as their role in battling the complexity of multimodal assignments.

 

Our first major assignment was the video essay which involved taking a contemporary film or television show and analyzing how its view on the concept of the future affects social, technological, or environmental relationships. For this project, I took an episode of one of my favorite television shows, The Good PlaceLinks to an external site., and analyzed how its view of the afterlife and the future of humanity affected the relationships between the characters and their surroundings. With this project, I was truly exposed to a full-fledged drafting process through various assigned process documents. First was the theoretical analysis blog post, where we analyzed an author’s view on how the concept of the future was represented through fictional dystopias. With this assignment, I was able to focus on just the author’s viewpoint before synthesizing it with the one made by The Good Place– overall leading to deeper analysis of the author’s claim by providing more clarity about what the author was trying to convey. With the scene analysis blog post, I combined the author’s claim with that made by the show in a short essay. By eliminating the multimodal aspect of the assignment, I was able to spend more time connecting the arguments together, making it a good stepping stone leading into the final project. By using the double column scripting, I began considering the visual component of the assignment, which allowed me to understand how my claim would meld with the video aspect of the project. In addition, a significant amount of the drafting process occurred outside these assignments, including narrowing down certain clips that I believed represented the main argument of the show and analyzing them by making notes of dialogue and actions. My final step was creating a script for the video essay. Here, I felt that my various process documents felt very disjointed, and I was still struggling to connect the arguments made by the author and the show together. Thus, I ended up writing sections of the script while also recording, resulting in an inefficient process that did not lead to a final product I was proud of. Through this assignment, I realized that I needed to put in more effort into the assigned process documents so my objective was clearer throughout the drafting process and so there was not as much work to be done while creating the final project.

 

The next assignment, the New Futures project, brought along another level of complexity that I was able to tackle by having a clearer goal for my final product. The project focused on creating a future world and a three dimensional object that represented it. Thus, I created a world that focused on eliminating the negative aspects of technology and instead focused on establishing a positive relationship between humans and technology. My first step in the composition process was analyzing the required readings which allowed me to draw inspiration from other future worlds to help me form my own. Overall, this helped me understand the scope of my project and helped me generate questions that I would have to be prepared to answer with the creation of my own world. I was able to form the baseline of the problem I decided to solve with the future threat blog post. The blog post forced me to create a clear objective for my world and an argument for how it would fix my identified future problem. Furthermore, it gave me the opportunity to fully research artificial intelligenceLinks to an external site. and technology – something that I would not have done if I had dived into the final assignment. The advertisement blog post marked the first step in creating my actual world as I took the problems I addressed earlier and combined them with ideas from the readings and my own creativity to create some of the major aspects of my world. Similarly to the scene analysis blog post for the video essay, this was a large stepping stone for the final write up for the project that was in a shorter format. I started to become more passionate about the project through the blueprint assignment where I was able to design my physical component of the project. Not only was this a necessary drafting step as I needed to 3D print my object, but it also helped me realize that I should take my drafting skills that I have learned from building robots and other engineering projects and apply them to my writing. When creating the final write up for the assignment, I created a brief outline of the points I planned to address which made the objective clearer and the helped me stay on track while writing. This assignment marked a turning point in my communication skills; I was significantly more organized and had a very clear argument throughout. While my proposed idea for my future world was hard to implement due to not completely eliminating technology, I had clear guidelines that drove the project. The real difference was applying the same engineering process principles that I learned in my other classes and extra curricularsLinks to an external site. to create a structured writing process.

 

Our final project, the podcast, marked a challenge for me as it added a collaborative aspect to the writing process, something that I did not have much experience in. With this assignment, as a group we had to investigate ways that visions for the future of Atlanta shape the choices made by various community partners. We started composing our podcast with a group meeting which helped me realize that I would now have to be extremely organized in order to present my argument to my group members effectively. This meeting generated our topic moving forward which was critique of the BeltLineLinks to an external site. and whether it has met its promises regarding community infrastructure and social development. We then moved into researching the BeltLine through online resources and through an interview with a BeltLine representative. This allowed us to further clarify our argument and get supporting information for the claim that we wanted to make. The interview provided an authoritative counterargument to our claim that we addressed in our final podcast. Most of our drafting occurred while creating the collaborative script. This was the most importance piece as it drove the final structure of our podcast by allowing us to split our argument into defined sections with various questions we wanted to answer as the topic. However, our final script led to a breakdown in collaboration and thus, we lost some of the cohesiveness of our claim. When creating the final script, each person scripted their own section which led to us losing the discussion element of the podcast, making the argument disjointed. While we kept in constant communication and continually checked over each other’s work, we would have saved a lot of time and I believe the final product would have been better if we had worked together more. Therefore, in the future I will focus on applying my writing and communication skills in a group setting to create more cohesive final products.

 

Throughout this semester, I believe I have significantly improved as a writer and as a communicator. After I identified a weakness early on in the class, I was able to focus on fixing it. While doing so, I encountered various challenges – from deadlines to lack of understanding – but I was able to eventually overcome this and learn from my prior mistakes. During my time at Georgia Tech, I hope to continue to improve as communicator, and I will make sure to apply the skills I have learned here to my future classes and career.

 

Process Documents: 

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