Assignment Twenty-six – Jessica Ewing

If I'm going to be completely honest, no matter how much I dreaded those timed writings (mostly over the paranoia that I'd have no idea what the prompt was trying to ask me), they were incredibly effective in training me to think quickly and comprehensively so that I could articulate my thoughts coherently into an essay.

Additionally, reading the other essays out loud and analyzing them together was really beneficial to me as well. Looking at the benchmarks alone wasn't always helpful, they just felt like flags that were stuck in the ground, saying "imitate this if you want an 8," while reading the essays showed me that there are a variety of ideas that can be expressed and different styles that can be written that all can point to that same score. And I'm not going to lie, when I first heard from a few of my senior friends that everyone reads aloud each other's essays, I panicked. I was afraid I was going to be humiliated in front of everyone else in the classroom through a grammatical error or a lack of expansion of an idea. Stupid, I know, but I held that fear nonetheless. Once we actually sat down and did our first writing and we all gathered around and began reading them, however, that nauseating fear set itself aside as I realized it wasn't as stressful as I thought it was going to be.

The one critique I think I'd have of this class would be the visual literacy assignments. They felt like they stuck out from the class, like they didn't really belong there, but we were still required to do them. If they held more of an integral part in the class, I think they would make more sense, but I ended up just feeling like they were a busy assignment to fill a space on a grade sheet. I enjoyed creating the advertisement, for sure, it made me expand my creativity to think how I could use different colors and placements to express an idea, but it just felt disconnected with the class itself.

Overall, though, I really enjoyed this class. It bettered me as both a writer and as a thinker. I believe I'm a more analytical person than I was before junior year, and I believe that's attributed to the kind of assignments and challenges put before me in this class. So thank you.