I personally really liked this course. It was the first time I was able to speak and write what I truly feel about political and social issues, without being scared of what other people think or say. I talked about controversial issues before, but I lied most of the time to please people. This semester, through writing for the humanities I was almost forced to write about political and social issues, so I decided that I would finally say and write what I think. It felt amazing, as expected most people didn’t liked what I had to say, but to my surprised there were people who also agreed with what I had to say, and added on to what I had to say, and others that even though didn’t agree with what I had to say, they understood it, and and we had conversations about it.

I completely hated writing ( and today I’m still not a super fan of it either). I thought that not only you wouldn’t use it ever in real life (at least in my major). Writing for me was just a bunch of meaningless words put together, in a way that’s readable and follows the guidelines. But after taking this course, I realized that writing wasn’t as boring and useless as I thought it was. I realized that those words have actual meaning, and that depending on what you say and the specific phrasing that you use, people might react on a way or another.

Most importantly I learned that through writing you can express yourself. Is a way to speak out what you feel and think. And as someone that is not the most fluent english speaker out there, writing helped me to be able to get my views across. And yes, writing can be hideous, but In this class, thanks to our teacher, me and my classmates had the opportunity to pick a topic of our liking. We weren’t forced to read a specific article and do a 6 page essay about. We had a choice in what to write about and how, which I really liked.

Things like our Opinion Editorial let us choose a stance in a controversial topic. which as you can see from my title and cover, mine was that the gender pay gap is a myth.

But all that freedom came with a price; It meant the work were a little bit more independent. That there was a lot of self evaluation and self reflection needed in those writings. And I am not talking about the mandatory reflection assignments for each essay. I am talking about things like editing, and drafting. Which I think I did pretty well on; specially for the third essay. The Critical Analysis essay.

As you can see from my Paper Proposal, my initial objective from these text wasn’t really analyse it, but rather respond to it. I let my subjective point of view in the topic, distract me from what I was actually supposed to do, since such mistake was then reflected on my first draft of my Critical Analysis, my teacher got to see it. But thanks to Ms. Shamecca, during the personal interviews, I was able to differentiate between an Analysis essay and an Argumentative one. So I had to revise and re do my essay, which I believe was 10 times better from what I intended doing at the beginning.

During the course of the class another key factor that helped me and my classmates do was what I like to call the “planning phase”, which is where we got to write or ideas and objectives down first and then you start writing the actual essay draft. It was basically a draft of a draft. And as stated before, even though the paper proposal for the critical essay wasn’t really as good since it wasn’t really about an Analysis essay. Other ones like my Audience strategy for my visual essay, were really good and helpful.

And I don’t only say that because I got a good grade on it. But also because writing down your ideas like, the audience and who is the message is going to. It also helped me to write down the purpose of the visual essay. Doing that Audience strategy helped me to have a purpose of my essay. Helped me to focus on my objective and not just do an issue for the sake of it.

Another thing that helped me through this course, was the peer review sessions that we had. It was a way to receive feedback in a very interactive way. And definitely one of the things I appreciate the most about the course.

And yes, some of the feedback was a little bit rude and misleading, but they all helped me with things like grammar, so I just took what I need it from it, and the rest just ignored it.

And as you can see, I was able to see people’s reaction from what I wrote, (but as mentioned before, in that class, my goal was to finally write what I wanted to say, without caring what other people might think about it). And sometimes my audience were exactly the people giving me feedback, so it was just the perfect opportunity to see their reaction, and to see if I achieved my goal.

I also liked helping and reviewing others people’s work, since most of the time I came from different point of view from what their are arguing about. So I was able to tell them how the other side thinks and feels about their topic, which they may or may not take into consideration in their final draft.

In this class I was also able to choose between different genres to write my essays on. And one of my most proud genres that I choose for my assignments, was memes.

Since we had to do an visual essay, the first thing that came to my mind was the use of satire. So I choose to do in kindof a meme format, which at the same time explain itself so people doesn’t misinterpret it.

But the hardest thing I had to do for the whole course was the use of a reliable source when making a claim. But at the end of the day I was able to find them. Specially for the Critical essay, were evidence was key there, since you were supposed to not use any evidence, it had to be a scholarly source. So I had to use websites that I never used before like https://scholar.google.com/

And since evidence is so important to me, when you are trying to make an argument. I most of the time direct quote the source. Like when I quoted Roy Cooper word for word from a youtube video.

But sometimes I paraphrase the evidence too, like I did in the oral report.

Finally thank you Ms. Shamecca for letting us be so free in our assigments, topics and opinion. I appreciate it.