To: abc14d@my.fsu.edu

From: new13c@my.fsu.eduSubject: ENC1102 with Erin Workman

 

        Good morning!

 

        Coming in as a freshman in college is overwhelming. The classes are huge, there’s 9x the people surrounding you, and the campus is colossal. When you’re a freshman, you’re still taking your pre-recs, so that means ENC1101 and 1102. I was very lucky with the teacher’s I received. My ENC1101 teacher was very strict in the way he taught, so although I learned a lot, I was very limited with the type of writing I was able to do. However, in my ENC1102 class, I learned more in a semester than I have my entire life. Although 8ams are something everyone wants to avoid, I would suggest taking one or at least an early class, so that your class size is smaller, giving you the chance to interact with everyone and develop a relationship with your professor. Growing up, unless you specifically choose a literacy and writing class if offered, you don’t learn about composing, and what genre audience and purpose really mean. There is such a deeper understanding than what you initially learn, and this class really went deep into explanation about composing. Composing is knowing what you want to write about, and then basing how you want to write it on who you’re writing to, while also knowing why you’re writing it, and what materials you’re going to use to get your message across. Then of course, you have your exigency, which I always coordinated with urgency, your rhetorical situation, remixing what you know with what you learn, peer review, and so on.
       When I first started in this class, I thought that it was going to be redundant in teaching me how to write depending on audience, being that I went over the affect audience has on your writing in ENC1101. I was very wrong. My idea of composing was: you get you prompt, figure out purpose, learn audience, and write. Which is basically what you’re taught in high school, so how would I have known the depth of composing? In our first assignment, we did a source based multi genre/media project. We had to do research on certain articles of reading, write bibliographies on them, and also include an introduction. This project was done in groups, and after we completed this assignment, we had to change our audience and genre. I realized then, how the purpose, genre, rhetorical situation and audience are all interconnected. Once our audience changed from college students to kindergarten students, our genre, purpose, and rhetorical situation changed as well. Our whole project was different. We had a colorful poster board rather than a long annotated bibliography, and took the angle of teaching kindergarteners what audience was. This first assignment opened my eyes to the true meaning of these first terms we learned. When thinking about my full knowledge after this class, I realize that I needed to do these projects in this order in order to transfer and remix my knowledge onto the next project.

        I believe that my idea of knowledge and my idea of composing are similar. Composing to me is all of the terms we’ve learned this semester interconnected. Each is important, each needs the others: audience, genre, circulation, purpose, rhetorical situation, peer review, research, remix, exigency, transfer, materiality, etc. Knowledge to me is continuously learning and building on what you learned so that all that you learn makes sense. Knowledge is all interconnected just like composing, and to gain knowledge you need to utilize all you can.
       I think what helped me most in defining my theory of composing were the multiple maps we created individually and in groups. It was a way for me to show myself how my theory continuously changed and grew throughout the semester. It also gave me a chance to see what other peoples’ theories were and remix them into my own. The peer review also helped me in this class, because I was able to see what other peoples’ opinions were on my work and how they would go about things, or how they would write them and it helped me to transfer that into my work and improve it. The in class assignment where we had the same situation but different prompts and responses also helped me to deepen my understanding of the key terms and how much they can influence a situation. The situation never changed, but who we were explaining to and what we were explaining in changed, and that changed our entire response. That really showed me how a different audience can change your entire assignment.

        In assignment #2, we did an inquiry based research essay. Out of all the projects, this was the hardest for me and required the most effort and time. Not only did we have to do research and write a research paper, but we also had to keep in mind our terms, and who our audience was and what type of genre we wanted to use. This class gave more leeway when it came to writing, and without limitations, it almost makes it harder because you have to many options of what you can do with your writing. Our research paper was to be about our major, and me being that I had just declared my major, it was really beneficial to research about it. Because of our freedom in writing this, I was able to incorporate pictures, charts, and lists. Then like our first assignment, after we had composed the paper we had to change our genre, in which I had to take the information I gathered from my second assignment and change it into five different genres for my third assignment. With the information I gathered from assignment #2, I created a private school. So rather than explaining to prospective students what teaching would be like, I’m explaining to parents what great teachers we have. I created a website, a brochure, a CD, a poster board, and a virtual tour. This was by far my favorite assignment, because it was fun creating my own school with all the features I want and all the features I would want if I had a child. I also enjoyed seeing other students’ presentations.

        This class is going to help me in writing essays for the rest of my college career. Going into college I never really had a class that went into the true definition of composing and how many different terms help to compose. I also didn’t know that composing was more than just writing, composing could be anything. Music, movies, TV shows, projects, anything. It will help me in composing presentations for future careers, and will also help me in knowing what genre to use for what specific people I’m talking to, while also providing me with knowledge of how to use a genre that could interest any type of audience. This class gave me such an in depth understanding of knowledge, I never correlated knowledge with remixing, better yet remixing as anything other than “remixed songs”. I never thought of knowledge as something that’s constantly built on by not only things you learn in school, but also things you learn from every day experiences and people around you. I never would have known any of these terms if I didn’t take this class, and I believe that these terms will be relevant in my life. I believe that I should share what I learned about knowledge, because I feel like not many people view it the way we were taught, and I feel like it could open their minds for a deeper understanding.Overall this class was a gallant learning experience. I not only became an extraordinarily better writer, but I also learned things I could use in every day life, which you don’t normally get from an English class. I would suggest this class to anyone, just maybe if it were offered at 9 am!! I hope that my email was informative enough to give you an overall recap of what I learned and the assignments I did and how they really helped me learn more than just classroom lessons. I would suggest this class to anyone, especially those who want to incorporate writing into their future careers.

 

I wish you the best!

 

Nora Woods