English 111
Steven Brandon
Jay Saunders
Final Learning and Performance Evaluation
This has been an exciting semester,
in which we have learned much. As based
off of the learning outcomes paper, I can say that I believe I have
successfully completed the goals of this course. We have covered a great deal of information,
and learned quite a bit. I believe the
self evaluation effectually demonstrates this.
First we will start with the
writing process. What is the writing
process? There are many ways to describe
it; but for this paper the best definition is this- the writing process is a
series of six steps in which one starts from scratch, and ends up with a written,
proof-read and published paper. In
English class, we learned the six steps of the ideal writing process, how to
put them into practice, and some various techniques for using the steps. The six steps of the writing process are:
prewriting, drafting, revising, proof-reading and editing, publishing and
reviewing. We also learned many ways to
draft. This included drafting in
sections and drafting in class. Drafting
in sections is when you draft your paper one segment at a time, and then
stopping after a segment is compete and proof reading what you have already
written. When we drafted in class, we
focused on using familiar styles, and them changing them into what we wanted
our paper to end up as. However, before
starting to draft, you must pre-write.
Pre-writing is the act of researching and
finding out all of the information for your paper. This includes looking up sources on the
internet, and finding books in the library.
This also includes putting together an outline. After pre-writing and drafting, comes
revision, which is going over your paper and working out all of the major
kinks. Most of this is just rearranging
your paper, sentences and making sure your thesis matches the rest of your
paper. We have also learned many ways to
proof read, which is fixing the skin deep surface flaws. One of the ways is to leave your paper for a
while, the longer the better, and come back to it later to read it with a
different mindset. Another idea is to
read it out loud. This helps you
recognize the mistakes, as you come across them. Reading slowly also helps locate mistakes.
Now that you have a revised,
well-written, and supported paper, it is time to publish it. Bringing your work to the world can be
performed many different ways. The ones
we covered in our class were blogging, and handing them into our teachers. When we blogged, we set up an account and
posted our work there. When we turned
our homework into our teachers, we just printed it out and gave it to
them. The last step in the writing
process, and sometimes the most skipped, is the reviewing stage. This step consists of taking your paper
after it has been published and looking back over it, seeing if you could
improve it anymore. These six steps are
of course the ideal process, but does my actual writing process look like
this? Coming into this class I had a
writing process, but it was not nearly developed. The process I learned in high school was
actually very close to the one taught here at J Sergeant Reynolds, but did not
delegate points. One of these points was
pre-writing. In high school I had
performed pre-writing without knowing what I was doing because the teachers
gave it to us as homework.
Now, in college, I know the value,
name and reason for pre-writing. Even
though I see the reason for the research, I sometimes do less pre-writing
because I have less time. By this I mean
that I have more activities, like work, and am a poor time manager. Because of this lack of pre-writing, my
papers sometimes turn put for the worst.
As far as drafting is concerned, I believe that I am very much the
same. By this, I mean that I usually sit
down and draft all at once. I do this
because I often need the motivation that the pressure of the due date
provides. I am trying to work on this by
applying one of the techniques we learned in class, drafting in segments. I am working on this because I believe my
papers will benefit from this practice.
It also helps with forcing yourself to have more time with pre-writing.
In English 111, we have also learned about
citing sources, people, when to cite and how to cite. One of the examples I have provided for this
is my second paper. In this paper, I
have cited all of my sources as in-text citations, as well as including a
bibliography at the end of the paper that cites all sources used in MLA format,
the current format that is preferred by most non-historical professors. One of the criteria for English 111 is to
prove yourself a man of integrity. I
believe I have done this. One has just
to take a look at my cited sources, to see that I have cited what I have
used.
In English 111, we are also
learning about communication. The two
types of communication we learned about are oral communication and written
communication. In oral communication we learned
about how your stance influences the message and that the relaxed position is
feet shoulders width apart and hands behind back. We also learned about maintaining the proper
distance between yourself and the other speaker. I demonstrated this in class by conversing
with three others in the correct, relaxed position at the proper space. In addition to our oral communication, we
also studied written communication. This
included the sentence types: IC, FANBOYS IC, IC, because IC, if IC, then IC and
although IC, actually IC. We also
covered introductory phrases, conjunctional adverbs, prepositional phrases and
dependent clauses. I must admit that
this is probably my weakest point in this class. I have trouble with it because when I am
writing, I get on a roll with a good idea and I want to put it down on paper
before I forget it. Because of this, my
sentence structure sometimes suffers.
Another criteria of the learning
outcome is knowing how to use digital technologies as well as old fashioned
paper. I believe I have excelled at this
as demonstrated of my mastery of the blog.
At first, this blog was very difficult for me because I was not used to
publishing electronically. In high
school, I had done very little on the computer, but this class helped to
develop these basic, necessary skills.
In this class, I have also learned
about rhetoric. One of the points
drilled into my mind was the rhetorical triangle. This triangle is how three groups relate to
each other. You have the author, who
crafts a message to the audience. The
author crafts a message to persuade the audience to take a certain course of
action. The audience’s job is to provide
feedback to the author, letting him know if he was successful or not. This is proved useful to me because it
reminds me of the fact that the author always has an agenda in mind and reminds
me that I must approach information critically.
I have learned much in this class
that I will be able to apply to my life and hope I have persuaded you with my
message that I have done the work to deserve a worthy grade.
