Week 15

After taking this course, I feel that my sentence structure has improved.  Sometimes I would have a few sentences that dragged on or were confusing to read, and now I can typically catch my own mistakes.  I still seem to have trouble with comma placement in some of my sentences, but that has gotten better as the semester has gone on.  I also struggle in making good conclusions to my papers without repeating too much.  I learned quite a bit about research this semester also.  I had never used the academic resources here at Ball State, so the day at the library was very helpful.  One part about the class that could be improved is the reading discussion.  I felt like a lot of reading was required, but when we had class, we didn’t usually talk about all the readings.  I did, however, like the group discussion that we often had during class.  I felt like the conferences were helpful and well placed in the course of the semester.  The first conference was a good place to discuss the first couple of papers and the second conference was at a good time to ask questions about the final project.  Before today’s class, I would have said that one more conference may have been helpful, but you did have a mini-conference with everyone to ask final questions, which was good.  Overall, this class helped me improve my writing, and was therefore beneficial.

Week 14

I feel that my best piece of writing was the research proposal and literature review.  The first thing that allowed me to focus and write well on this paper was the type of paper that it was.  I am an organizer, so I liked that the assignment allowed me to organize my thoughts on the entire semester before having to write the final paper.  I also enjoy analyzing, and the literature review allowed me to do that for each of my sources.  That helped me figure out which sources I wanted to use for what sections of my paper, and also showed me what my sources lacked.  I feel like this paper did a lot for me so I didn’t mind writing it and took time on it, which is why it was my best piece of work this semester.  The exploring subcultures paper was probably my worst paper just because I felt like I was repeating myself a lot by re-stating my fixed positions and stereotypes.  The annotated bibliography was right there in the middle because I had already done one before, but it wasn’t really a paper like I am used to writing for classes.