a letter where I reflect on the class ad how my writing has changed
Writing:
I know for a fact that I love to write, but I used to not know anything about a computer except how to work the word document so I could type up my stories faster. After taking this class, I feel like I've expanded the way I look at writing: writing is not just about sitting at a desk and trying to get the story out. Writing is not just sitting at a desk typing up paper after paper, and writing is not just years of research with dusty books about subjects that have been dead for years. Of course, writing is that. But it is so much more.
I've gotten much better at using the technology, but not just using it, also incorporating it into my writing. I loved the twitterive because it took my twitter account and the tweets that I was putting on every single day and then we made it into a writing assignment, which I enjoyed writing, and wanted to do again with other ideas. I also enjoyed taking lines out of the readings and writing it into microfiction or haikus. After expanding the twitterive like that the genres were easier to play around with because I had a better feel for the way that they would work.
The other thing that I have is that I write better alone because I don't really have a strong personality, so when I write with other people, my writing style tends to get lost in the other people that are working with me. The bouncing off of ideas I liked, but I prefer to write alone. The other way it works is if the group is good and divides up the work evenly, which my group managed.
When it comes to the website, I enojoyed working on it, learning to work the website. blogging was fun as long as there was a focus, which is something that I knew about before the class, but this class reinforced. I thought maybe if I'd been forced to blog all the time I would still be able to continue it without as much of a focus, but of course I still struggled with it. The twitter account kind of died halfway through the semester because it was a little too much for me to do all the time every day and I don't really remember a lot of the times to get that kind of stuff done.
My process has changed over the entire semester of the class, but even then I still find it hard not to fall back into my old habits that I'm used to writing in. I did explore a bunch of different genres and ways of writing, but I didn't find any mystery in the writing. Writing is a mystery to me--it's a miracle that we can even write and people understand it.
Research:
I never used to enjoy research, but this class made me realize that if you enjoy not just what you're writing about, but also how you're researching, it can be enjoyable. I ended up loving interviewing and oral history and narrative inquiry. It was a lot better to use the qualitative researching, listening to people's stories and relating them to your own to make the research possible instead of trying to be scientific about it. Although I never was good at science, so that could be why I don't really like the quantitative way of researching. I like the way the qualitative research makes me think about myself and the people around me more. I got better at making connections and field research, even though that was easier than before.
I still can't really get into the whole annotated bibliography and the abstracts, however. I'm still not great at trying to get a good summary out of an entire article: it's either too much or too little. And abstracts are hard to me because I can never think of anything to say in them. I don't like to spoil surprises or anything that comes later in the writing, but that's what an abstract is, so I still haven't really gotten into it as much.
Technology:
I loved all of the technology that we used in the class. Weebly and this website were my favorite technologies from this class. I want to continue using the website to try to get my creative writing out into the world to see if people like me. I enjoyed working on the website and making it look nice and getting all the assignments organized on there.
Twitter is a good way to follow people, but for me it was just a bit too much work to try to remember, like I wrote above. I don't really know what to say either, in the fact that we can only say it in 170 words or less is something that I struggle with. But I'm going to keep it because I like stalking the celebrities and the fictional characters on there, like Darth Vader.
Also like I said above, blogs are amazing, as long as I can have a focus on what to write about. I'm going to find one, of course. I liked the blog and I'd love to continue. I even got an idea from the movie we watched in class, Food Inc.
Lastly, when we tried to make the interviews happened, I learned a lot about when technologies don't work and don't want to work. We had a digital recorder but it was older and even after getting our friends and family in on it, we still couldn't seem to get it going. I still don't know exactly how we got it going but I do know it involved a lot of converting and hours and hours of work. After that, we had to edit the video, which also took hours and hours of work. It wasn't just interviewing, it was choosing facts to go into the video, picking the right song, and getting to put it all together. And in the end, I still don't understand exactly how the technology works. But at least I have a better understanding of what to do when it goes wrong, and I can make a video...which was one of my goals.
I know for a fact that I love to write, but I used to not know anything about a computer except how to work the word document so I could type up my stories faster. After taking this class, I feel like I've expanded the way I look at writing: writing is not just about sitting at a desk and trying to get the story out. Writing is not just sitting at a desk typing up paper after paper, and writing is not just years of research with dusty books about subjects that have been dead for years. Of course, writing is that. But it is so much more.
I've gotten much better at using the technology, but not just using it, also incorporating it into my writing. I loved the twitterive because it took my twitter account and the tweets that I was putting on every single day and then we made it into a writing assignment, which I enjoyed writing, and wanted to do again with other ideas. I also enjoyed taking lines out of the readings and writing it into microfiction or haikus. After expanding the twitterive like that the genres were easier to play around with because I had a better feel for the way that they would work.
The other thing that I have is that I write better alone because I don't really have a strong personality, so when I write with other people, my writing style tends to get lost in the other people that are working with me. The bouncing off of ideas I liked, but I prefer to write alone. The other way it works is if the group is good and divides up the work evenly, which my group managed.
When it comes to the website, I enojoyed working on it, learning to work the website. blogging was fun as long as there was a focus, which is something that I knew about before the class, but this class reinforced. I thought maybe if I'd been forced to blog all the time I would still be able to continue it without as much of a focus, but of course I still struggled with it. The twitter account kind of died halfway through the semester because it was a little too much for me to do all the time every day and I don't really remember a lot of the times to get that kind of stuff done.
My process has changed over the entire semester of the class, but even then I still find it hard not to fall back into my old habits that I'm used to writing in. I did explore a bunch of different genres and ways of writing, but I didn't find any mystery in the writing. Writing is a mystery to me--it's a miracle that we can even write and people understand it.
Research:
I never used to enjoy research, but this class made me realize that if you enjoy not just what you're writing about, but also how you're researching, it can be enjoyable. I ended up loving interviewing and oral history and narrative inquiry. It was a lot better to use the qualitative researching, listening to people's stories and relating them to your own to make the research possible instead of trying to be scientific about it. Although I never was good at science, so that could be why I don't really like the quantitative way of researching. I like the way the qualitative research makes me think about myself and the people around me more. I got better at making connections and field research, even though that was easier than before.
I still can't really get into the whole annotated bibliography and the abstracts, however. I'm still not great at trying to get a good summary out of an entire article: it's either too much or too little. And abstracts are hard to me because I can never think of anything to say in them. I don't like to spoil surprises or anything that comes later in the writing, but that's what an abstract is, so I still haven't really gotten into it as much.
Technology:
I loved all of the technology that we used in the class. Weebly and this website were my favorite technologies from this class. I want to continue using the website to try to get my creative writing out into the world to see if people like me. I enjoyed working on the website and making it look nice and getting all the assignments organized on there.
Twitter is a good way to follow people, but for me it was just a bit too much work to try to remember, like I wrote above. I don't really know what to say either, in the fact that we can only say it in 170 words or less is something that I struggle with. But I'm going to keep it because I like stalking the celebrities and the fictional characters on there, like Darth Vader.
Also like I said above, blogs are amazing, as long as I can have a focus on what to write about. I'm going to find one, of course. I liked the blog and I'd love to continue. I even got an idea from the movie we watched in class, Food Inc.
Lastly, when we tried to make the interviews happened, I learned a lot about when technologies don't work and don't want to work. We had a digital recorder but it was older and even after getting our friends and family in on it, we still couldn't seem to get it going. I still don't know exactly how we got it going but I do know it involved a lot of converting and hours and hours of work. After that, we had to edit the video, which also took hours and hours of work. It wasn't just interviewing, it was choosing facts to go into the video, picking the right song, and getting to put it all together. And in the end, I still don't understand exactly how the technology works. But at least I have a better understanding of what to do when it goes wrong, and I can make a video...which was one of my goals.
