This semester has been not as bad as I expected. I had to write some different types of papers then I have in the past, but I felt good about the new skills that I learned. I had to think more about where to start and how to start these essays. It was a good way to grow my time management skills.
Thinking back to the very beginning I cannot believe how nervous I was about my analysis paper because of the topic of analysis. In the past, I have analyzed books or videos, but this was on an ad and for some reason that scared me. I am not exactly sure why I was so scared, but I, fortunately, calmed down enough to write a decent paper. It was definitely harder than what I am used to, but it ended up going really well.
Looking back at my papers and my reflections my synthesis paper was one of the hardest papers that I wrote this semester. The other papers were similar to papers I have written before, but the synthesis paper was new and kind of scary. After the amount of time that I have spent writing analysis papers in high school, that is what my brain defaults to, but the synthesis was different and I had to put my thoughts into this paper instead of just talking about how the authors conveyed their points. Looking back at my posts I can see how scared I was to write this paper and even once I turned it in I was not confident in the paper, but everything turned out alright.
Looking back the thing that scared me the least was the in-class essay, probably because it was very similar to other papers that I have written. It was fun to think back to my junior year of high school when I really came into my own as a writer. That class taught me so much and passing it was one of my proudest moments. This class has reminded me of that class and it is nice to have something familiar in a very different environment.
The in-class essay was a precursor to another thing that was familiar to me, the research paper. In my high school, we did a couple of research paper, and we also did a smaller version last semester. While I have written research papers for other classes, I can remember the moment of panic that set in once I realized that this one was going to be very different. We had plenty of steps along the way, but once I started to actually write my paper I had no idea where to start because I had so much information. Looking back I am surprised that I did not talk about that stress as much in my Unit Reflection post for that assignment. Most other research papers I have written had used more recent sources, but I had found a bunch of dense academic journal articles to support my case. This made starting the paper that much more difficult and I am proud of how I handled it, I think that is where I have grown most this semester. I have had trouble trying to figure out where to start and letting it frazzle me, but for this assignment, I think I did a good job of using the stress to my advantage. It motivated me to find somewhere to start instead of avoiding it like I have done in the past.
The multimodal project was interesting because I was not using my topic for our project. I was fine with getting away from the tedious details of the Euro, but I felt that I did not have much to contribute to the project. I am not used to not being the person left with all the work, so I was constantly asking if there was anything I could do to help. I think we did a good job of splitting up tasks, but there was only so much we could do for editing the video. It was a good growth experience for me because I got to see what little ways I could help to make the entire process go by easier. This was an example of how group projects are supposed to work and it was interesting.
I think that this year I have grown significantly in my abilities to work under pressure instead of letting it consume me. In the past, my strengths were that I was good at putting together a cohesive argument and remembering to back it up. Now I think I can add learning to incorporate new skills to my list of strengths. When it comes to my weak points, I think that I have a hard time starting papers. Looking back at all of my reflections they all mention at least once that I had trouble figuring out where to start. I feel that I have gotten better at figuring that out, but I am not sure I am really that good yet.
Writing is something that is used in every career and will continue to be something that I will work on throughout my career. I am hoping to go into the international business field and I will be writing business proposals and other things for my job so it will be good that I continue working on my writing skills for the rest of my life.