Overall Reflection

After I finished my first draft for project 1, I was relieved. We only had to do 750 words but I ended up doing a little over 1,000 words. I was finally able to relax knowing that I had less work to do before the next due date. But as I began revising my draft for my conference, I started to worry. I am not the best writer, so I knew that I could always make my essay better. But how? The time was ticking, and as I re-read my essay, I could hardly find anything to revise except for adding or deleting a few words throughout my composition. I was not sure whether that meant my essay was good enough that there was not much revising needed, or that I would be stuck with the same mediocre paper because my revising skills sucks. I continued re-reading my essay hoping to find any way I could make it better but my mind would always come up blank. So, I decided to take a deep breath, save my work, exit the page, and forget about it. I did the very best I could. Before I knew it, I was at the Sweet Shop, sitting in front of the professor reading my revised essay. To my relief, he did not think there was much to revise either. The mental image of fat C’s on my nearly identical first draft and revised draft immediately turned into the two dazzling A papers I was trying to get. I was so glad to hear that my essay was great and that there was not much to be done besides putting it in MLA format and changing the font of the thoughts and flashbacks in my essay. That is simple enough. I was able to get most of the work out of the way, and only I needed to do those easy tasks before my project is finished.

Besides the lack of words needed to fulfill the 2,000-word count, I felt like my essay was missing something. I was not sure what I was missing. I could not put my finger on it. Nevertheless, I made sure my draft was ready for the conference and made a note of anything I was unsure of. During my conference, Professor Wenzel helped me realize what I was missing: I did not have a text. That is one of the most important parts of the project, but it somehow slipped my mind. We spent the whole conference talking about what I could use as my text. By the end of the meeting, I had more than enough to use for my text and to fulfill the 2,000-word count. My project 2 is about the difficulty of medical education, and the experiences of current premed and med students. Because I am also a musician, I compared the competitive nature of medical school to auditioning for an orchestra. I used this comparison as my text. At first, I did not do well in this assignment because I had trouble analyzing my text and genre, but once I talked with my professor, I understood what I needed to do to make it better. My revised essay came out better and it effectively analyzed my genre and text.

Initially, I thought this project was going to be the most difficult out of all of them. However, that was not the case. Even though I made it more complicated than it needed to be, I would not say that it was the most difficult assignment out of all the three projects we were assigned. For this project, we were to create three different genres using the topics we chose for project 2. My three genres were a graph, a poster, and a social media post. Making a graph proved to be the most difficult task out of all them because I had to learn how to use Microsoft Excel and then create a graph using data I gathered from the Association of American Medical Colleges website. In the end, I am satisfied with how my project came out, and am proud of my presentation. I enjoyed completing this project more than any of the other assignments.

I understood what I was signing myself up for when I enrolled in this ENC 2135 class, but I underestimated the amount of writing I would do. Even though I am a decent writer, I do not like writing very much. I thought the amount of writing I would have to do for this class was going to be a burden, but it turns out that it was more enjoyable than I expected. I believe that my writing improved since the beginning of this course, and now, I am more capable of analyzing texts and genres. Overall, I enjoyed this class because I was engaged throughout the entire course. The writing assignments felt less like a chore, and was more interesting and way easier to complete.