Our week of 11/21-11/25 consisted of only one meeting for our English 105 class due to Thanksgiving Break. Although the break was nice, UNC students couldn’t help but have the ever approaching exams and end of semester on their minds.
Despite our one day of class, we got a lot done to prepare for finishing our long awaited video essays. We had a workshop in class to review one of our group member’s beginning to their video essay. Everyone seemed to be on track for success. Our final project is due on Wednesday, November thirtieth. Creating a video essay has definitely been out of my comfort zone, but I have enjoyed getting familiar with Premiere Pro. As a writer, I was able to think outside of the box of how I could write my essay in a way that could be made into a visual. Honestly, my biggest struggle with this project has been putting away time to do it. While Premier Pro is user friendly, it is still a time consuming task to go through videos and combine them for minutes on end.
Another topic we discussed in class was a review on “Comparing the Priorities, Values, and Goals of the Disciplines.” This was a good review for what we have covered in class, and a bit more of an introduction to business writing. As our semester comes to a close, it is a time to reflect on what we learned and practiced this semester. We had a unit on the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. I think that I grew as a writer the most in our social sciences project. Although I cannot speak on behalf of the class, I felt like I had done the least amount of writing in this field prior to this class. My favorite part of the class was developing my UP3. The short story “Cathedral” was a story I had done a project on in high school. While being familiar with the story made my project a bit easier, I took a completely different route on the analysis than I had in high school. I hadn’t written a formal essay on “Cathedral” before, and I feel like I learned so much more about the story and hidden themes.
As a whole, I think English 105 benefited my peers and I. I wrote many papers this semester, and I remember implementing corrections I had seen on my unit projects. A specific example is that direct quotes are not supposed to be a sentence on its own in a paper. I had never realized this and had been doing it often. I now see how my papers seem more cohesive when I introduce the quote instead of leaving it on its own. As a student, I still need to improve my citation abilities. I feel like I improved this semester, but I dread making citations and wish I was better at remembering which to use for which format. Overall, it has been a good semester full of practicing our writing skills and learning new techniques.
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Google Image, Creative Commons License.