Reflections

Project 1

I was overall very happy with this project. I loved to idea of having little vignettes and have never considered writing a piece like that for any of my classes, it challenged me as a writer and as a student. I feel like as a whole, and what we talked about the writings merged together pretty decently, except for the last vignette which I would have changed / taken out if I could at this point. The story seems to have a massive shift due to it as it starts out by coming out and gaining acceptance from my family and then shifts into a more self acceptance which didn’t fit the narrative before it. I wish I would have planned this better to be more inclusive to that last section and for the last section to be more inclusive to the other sections. Thinking forward, I will apply more planning to my essays and go forward from there. I would change the names of each section as they don’t fit the theme of having 5 stories because they do not seem like names of individual stories themselves. I also wish I went further into the project in terms of being more contemporary. I wish I labeled it out like a textbook and made it appear like the writer, although writing a textbook was clawing through trying to get his message out there to the masses.

Project 2

This piece was written about literacy, I chose to write about my own literacy in music and how it has grown. I was fairly happy with how this actually turned out. I enjoyed talking about music and my growing up in the subject and the ultimate gain of knowledge from middle school to college. However, while I liked the story and the idea behind it, I wish I did better. I planned this essay pretty intensely but I still managed to get lost at the end, while it makes sense to someone (me) who knows the exact reason behind every single paragraph, the final paragraph I wish made more sense, which was the same problem that I had with project 1. Thinking forward, I need to get more outside input on my essays and projects, I can no longer just do it by myself. I need fresh views on my works in order to gain actual, decent opinions. I just need an outside view. I wish I had better ways to format it on here, as well. While I love the look of this website, my ability to format text columns is very minimal. I still kind of wanted to keep the theme of project 1, while expanding my literacy was the obvious message, I ultimately wanted it to be digestible. I feel like as you write and create multiple chapters or ideas in one, that are separated, it is much more digestible to have them work by themselves and ultimately in revision create a string that wraps it all together.

Project 3

Project 3 was full of ups and downs in many ways. Emotionally, for my friends, this was a hard subject to talk about. Drum Corps is a huge commitment and dedication for anyone involved, and my paper was about being sent home due to risk or injury and how to prevent it. I was sure on who to talk to about this topic though, my friend who just got sent home was a big red flag, but most of my friends who marched have pretty terrible back problems long term so I spoke to them about it, assuming that they had come to terms. What I had found was more than just physical pain, however, most people experience depression after “aging out” so that kind of surprised me, and there were many studies I found and cited on not only physical health of drum corps but also mental health. However, I liked the topic and I feel like I did a good job explaining what I was talking about and the issues I had if I were talking to a drunk corps veteran. I wish that I worded things better and stayed more simple in my explanations and ideas. I believe that you thought the same, I should have not used as many sources and have been more conservative on how much I cited them and used more pathos in my writing, via individual experiences or interviews. I feel like I imitated a research paper as opposed to a news paper or drum corps article, and I wish that I would have paid more attention to that.