During this quarter in UWP, I learned a wide variety of information about writing that I did not even anticipate covering. One of the biggest things for me was learning about the categories and genres when it comes to papers and writing which. For example, I have never really thought about if an article I read was academic or popular. There was an entire genre of writing called blogging that I have only heard about but never really indulged in or understood what it was. Before this class, I would have confidently said that I do not really read blogs but after doing research on what it was and what platforms people write blogs on, I realized I did read blogs. One of the content creators that I have followed for a long time wrote his little snippets on WordPress which I thought was fascinating because for my first blogs, I wrote about the same game. It felt like I was following his footsteps. But with all these genres, there were a couple of assignments that made me work directly with it that helped me learn and work with a UWP learning outcome/guideline.
One of these assignments was the Source Matrix that I did (I have included a picture of it above). I was researching my topic and finding as much information about it as possible in both academic and popular sources while also making sure that I was not writing down any primary sources. This activity helped me separate and categorize information on what they are exactly and what they can be used for. In that same assignment, we also had to categorize the source into a few categories for which it would be used in our essay/research paper. With constant practice on categorizing sources and understanding how each can be used, I understand the sources themselves more. The perspective of the author and the reasoning behind creating this journal/article and why it is important to learn this information are all things I can find much more easily now.
In addition, although not specifically the same as categorizing, learning the definitions of a lot of writing terms has also helped me in understanding the language of writing. For the UWP guildlines, this falls under the Knowledge of Conventions. This included all the lectures that went over what we thought the definition of some terms were and what they were defined as. The ones that I remember the most clearly was the difference between tone and mood. When hearing these two words, they do sound as though their definitions are quite similar as they go hand in hand. Another pair that are remarkably similar were revising and editing. Learning these words will help me communicate with other students and professors much more easily. It feels as though I am learning the lexis required to join the English discourse community.
The most important thing that I have learned about myself as a reader and writer is that I do have a lot more interest in English than I thought on the first day in UWP. For one of our first assignments, we had to do a little introduction about ourselves and our experience with English in the past and I constantly kept writing about how I found it boring and that I had little to no interest in English whatsoever. But as I was researching my blog topic, I was having fun. I enjoyed researching about this area of a game I never really went in-depth to and learning about the niche areas along with what the discourse community was going through and what they thought. A lot of my old essays were just first rough drafts that I haphazardly submitted because I could not find even an ounce of energy inside of me to care about the paper. I believed sincerely that I hated English and everything with it but as I was writing my blogs, I found myself going back to the starting paragraphs and rewriting some parts. I put a lot more effort and care into the blog posts because I was finally writing about something that I had interest in and cared about compared to the old essays about the Declaration of Independence or something of the sort.
This class also made me more interested in reading but not as much as writing. The only assignment that impacted my interest in reading was The Boat. The visuals for the book were stunning and made me a lot more captivated by the story. Some would say that I am still not interested in reading at all, and I was only there because there were little visual clips of the story on that website. Though that may be true, if that version were never published, I would have never stuck around to read another 5 chapters of that story in my free time so I would call that one a win. Learning all this about myself will help me in the future because my preconceptions about a topic were completely wrong, and I ended up liking it. This would help me give things a chance or to not judge a book by its cover. I should not go into it thinking that I would hate it and that I am only doing it because I must and not because I want to. I should take my time and find things associated with that certain topic that I have interest in and work off that.
Out of all the classes that I have taken in UC Davis up to this point, this one class was the only one that has helped me improve this much. Because of this class, I will do my first portfolio and research paper. This was a big steppingstone into college as I would need to start doing my own research without each step being guided by an assignment made by my professor. At the end of the day, I am equipped with a lot more knowledge and skill when it comes to English and writing and reading. Although it is not a huge improvement, I am opening up a bit more to the English side of subjects and assignments and now understand the APA format and how to find sources and verify that they are peer reviewed and is useful to me or not.