Over
these past couple months ENC 1102 has helped me learn more about academic
writing. No not the writing you did back in high school, just regurgitating
information that you found in a book or online. Rather writing by becoming
enveloped in a conversation, and bringing in some knowledge from others in the
conversation while also expanding that knowledge by bringing in some of your
own ideas and research. At the beginning of the semester I thought this final
research paper and portfolio was going to be pretty daunting. Though I actually
enjoyed every minute of it.
That
doesn’t mean the course went on without a hitch. When we first started
conceptualizing our Interpretive Summary I was faced with two issues. One was
how do I write about a subject that is already common knowledge to me, to the
general public who doesn’t know much about the issue. The other being finding
out the difference between showing and telling. In my first couple of writings
I almost always was just telling. But over the semester I was able to learn to
show more and that greatly helped my writing.
With
the annotated bibliography I was again facing another issue, the topic I was
trying to research did not have many sources to go off of. This forced me to
look deep into each source to fully understand what each author was trying to
convey. This deep analysis helped me when I was able to find new and more
relevant sources.
After
sitting down and discussing my first draft of my Lit Review I realized I needed
to do a lot of work on this section. I needed better framing mechanism to help
guide the flow of the research to date. I also needed to expand upon each idea
more, and discuss the research more fully to help the audience understand.
Through my many revised drafts of my Lit review I was finally able to achieve
the outcome I wanted.
Performing
real primary research for the first time for a research project was probably my
favorite part of the course. This helped me learn a lot more about research
studies and what works best for certain issues that you are trying to get
answers to. This also really helped me learn how to draft my own research
study, which I have never truly done before.
Writing
my final research paper was very exciting. I went back over my Lit Review and
made the best version of it I could with careful revisions and expanding on
more ideas. I also wrote out my methods and results section, which was fun but
difficult to fully describe what my research did and how I came to the results I
did.
Overall
this course has really taught me a lot. Not only about becoming a better writer
by knowing what areas to work on, but also to learn how to conduct research.
This project brought an interest to light that I would love to embrace,
researching. If one day I ever receive my master or doctoral degree, and am
able to work with a university or local government to conduct my own research, I
would be ecstatic.
