Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

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[edit] Reflection Letter #1

So I’ve just finished writing my first college level paper and all I can think is how disappointed I am. Not so much disappointed in myself, but disappointed in that I feel the same way now about college writing courses as I do about high school ones. This being that there is so much work that the whole point of the exercises gets lost. I feel that for the first paper we got so buried under all of the side work that the paper itself got pushed out of the way. We did more reviews of reviews than reviews of people’s papers and I think this really damaged the lesson that was being taught.

I really feel like I have learned nothing about writing from this piece. It’s a piece most people have already had to do while in high school and for me I got a lot more help writing it there than I did here. For this paper I wrote a first draft and got a little feedback after I had already written my second draft, making all the feedback useless. Then I received no feedback on the second draft and had to write a final one. I just extended the paper by using bigger words and better grammar; this is just common sense not good writing practices. I did things that I already know how to do, not that I was taught in this class. When I received my grade and decided to do a re-write I found myself doing the same minor touch-up’s because the feedback was so vague and abstract. After getting my second final draft back saying that there were not enough change for my teacher to edit, even though I almost doubled the amount of text that I could actually change, I found myself learning that I might as well just take the B instead of doing massive amounts of pointless work to get a slightly better grade. So as I said before I realize that college writing (in my mind) is no different from high school writing and that I learned almost nothing from this assignment.

The one thing that I did learn is that I should make things very basic and read over many times. I say this because I lose 1 percent on my final grade for every type of spelling and grammatical error I make. This makes every paper extremely daunting, in that they are no longer worth an already large 15% to 25% of your grade, but a 65% to 75%. This also makes it so that if you are writing a paper that is worth 15% of your grade and you make 15 different types of errors your paper is void and no matter what grade you get it is actually a zero. Take mine for an example I got a B or an 85, which is a decent grade in my mind, but I lost 11 points which bring my paper from being worth an B or an 85 to a F or a 10 or 15. So as I said before the only lesson I learned about writing for this class is to take my time and just keep doing re-writes.

TheFlyingScotsman 15:23, 29 March 2007 (EDT)