Brandon Vasquez
12/17/2020
The first thing I want to start off this reflection is with a thank you. Thanks to all of my peers and of course Professor Otte. Through my peers in this class, I learned how fun and beautiful it is to try and understand each of our perspectives, to learn of how subjective the world we inhabit is, and to come together in this corner of the world and just read and write. Now for Professor Otte, I want to thank you for the great feedback that you have given me, even though I am trying my best to fix and listen to these issues I feel as though I might not be doing it properly…but I hope that I can one day write without feeling so anxious. Both Professor Otte and my peers have allowed me, through this course, to finally be able to speak my mind just a bit; thank you.
As for my writing, I think that I have definitely progressed much more especially after realizing what was required at the college-level as well as the expectations that I had for myself and that were implied throughout the course. The first thing I’d like to point out is the revising and rechecking phase, I recently made a friend through this class and learned of the importance of having another person review your work and even adding ideas to it. This helped me sort of develop a drafting and revision phase for most of my work, which has become a great help, especially with these quantitative papers. Another great aspect that my writing was strengthened in was for all of my research papers, I learned how to easily navigate through and differentiate what academic sources from CCNY’s large database. This also helped me get a sort of the gist of how to make my citations for all my papers since CCNY can let you cite your sources with any desirable format.
I think that throughout the course the greatest thing that I learned from the course was how to further analyze readings and interpret them through the rhetorical and literary elements that the author uses to bring the story to life. I believe this is the greatest thing I learned in this course because analyzing both the author and my peer’s writing allowed for a deeper connection to form simply through written words. This writing allowed for us to use imagery, tone, and stance to inspire and bring to life thoughtful conversations. This is why my favorite project for this class has to be the genre project, it showed me that genre is such a powerful tool that can allow for multiple forms of one’s expression, from art to writing both can indescribably inspire…motivate….and even depress you.
This course has furthered my love for literature. It made me realize that there are always people out there still questioning the many ways of the world through the words they put on a paper. Their legacy becomes immortal when they write and I hope to one day create my own legacy and share it with the people who may find a small bit of compassion in it.