By Zachary Rodrigues, ENC1101 Fall 2021
ENC 1101 has taught me plenty about writing and rhetoric but it’s also taught me a lot about myself. This class has given me the tools that I needed to understand writing, including my own, to a much deeper level. Now I am considering every part of a text as a rhetorical choice that the author made to achieve a specific rhetorical goal. Metacognition is a new concept that was introduced to me in this class. It is basically just understanding your own thought process and thinking about whether or not it is the best way to approach a task.
I used that to reconsider my writing process. I would rarely utilize all the steps of the writing process to really produce my best work. I usually devoted most of my time to making my first draft as good as possible so that I wouldn’t need to do too much revision work. This is why my AP English Language and Composition Exam essay is important to my portfolio. It shows the mistakes that I was making before I started thinking about my process. I also wanted to include this essay because I see it as a pivotal moment in my writing career. Since I wrote that essay and failed that test I’ve been striving to learn from my past mistakes and grow as much as possible.
Now nearing the end of the course, I am once again reflecting on my past work and how it has affected me as a writer. In the course, we develop effective strategies for completing writing tasks. I discuss my strategy when completing a writing assignment in my personal writing theory, a collection of claims that I have made about writing. I feel that I gained some real clarity about how to effectively make use of a source and write concisely without too much “fluff”. The work that I am using to put together my personal writing theory is a good showcase of some of the course outcomes that I have accomplished.
