29 September 2021

One of the many ways I’ve seen myself improve through this class was through the journal prompts. Even though I never actually completed any for this class I did actually buy a journal because the thought of it excited me. Right off the bat, I can definitely say that I am incredibly in tune with my emotions, and I’m way less indecisive than I used to be. I dont know how I even got to this place but I actually find myself being happier and way more satisfied after a couple of journal rants. So this class absolutely pushed me to try a new thing which I hope to continue. Also, I love how much we actually read in this class. During this age of technology we get so lazy and hectic, we forget to give ourselves time to just let all that go and pick up a good book once in a while. During covid I actually started reading to improve my focus and I thought it was a good idea to read Dante’s inferno without hesitation it is definitely an amazing book that I need to finish but lately, I dont have a good amount of time I can take to really enjoy the book. But I have been able to scratch the itch that tells me to read because of this class. The assignments that we complete make me dread reading sometimes but most of the time I end up genuinely loving the reading and wanting to understand more about the author and the story that they have to tell. So this phase definitely has been able to provide me with a way to begin reading again so much so that I actually went out and borrowed a book that interested me which hopefully I can get through before I have to return it. Some of the most meaningful insights that I’ve learned through this phase were how to properly read several pages of work without it becoming a big blur. I used to have a problem where I would read and all the words would just go blurry and I would only come back after reading several paragraphs blindly. But through having to actually understand the reading and having to write about it this class forced me to adapt and change my reading skills to better suit my needs. For example now when I read I will always re-read anything that trips me up or search up definitions of difficult vocabulary. And I even realized how to make my room more comfortable to accommodate my reading. For example, I cannot read without a cold glass of water nearby or a cold room because anything warm will just make me incredibly sleepy and it distracts me from the work that I have to do. In regards to the learning outcomes syllabus “Ghost of the future” really stuck with me as a reading that helped me explore a biological concept of environmental studies. Since reading it I was reminded of my old class AP environmental where we explored so many different concepts of global warming and the reading really brought me back to my old mentality of how I need to change my habits and the reading really made me more conscious about my decisions. Overall, this class is still an amazing learning experience that allows me to read many new articles to strengthen my analysis and reading techniques.

19 October 2021

So when I first found out that we had another cover letter and essay due I was completely confused. It felt like not that long ago since I wrote the last essay. Nonetheless, I wrote the essay and after reading it I couldn’t shake the feeling of emotion to go out and do the things I want to do. Stories during this past lesson like The Tent lingered in my mind for several days. I took the reading as an emotional story that motivates the reader to do what they love and because of the short story, I kept that mindset with me on lockdown ready to go out in the world with a new attitude. At work, I didn’t stress as much as I used too and I genuinely felt way better with the new mindset change.

For my rhetorical analysis, I chose to write about two stories with completely different styles of writing but with similar messages. I chose to do these two stories in order to build a stronger understanding of different rhetorical strategies based on the genre of writing. Just like in the learning outcomes “Explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations.” These two stories used different strategies at persuading and motivating the reader yet there are connected in the sense that they do an excellent job of conveying a message of hope without directly telling the reader.

So some of the best advice that I learned from this phase was to not overthink my writing. Like back in high school they always would critique our writing endlessly and I felt the need to try and make every sentence perfect but that only lead to me spending hours re-reading and overthinking every sentence. So one trick that I picked up was to write the passage first without overthinking my words only to edit them over with new words and phrases that better fit the formality of the text.

Overall while re-reading Ghosts of the future I did pick up on the importance of fact-checking evidence for what I noticed was that most of the evidence used in the article was given by the same publicist. This provides the reader with information that is very biased and tailored to better fit the article.

In many ways, my writing has improved significantly because I am now able to write out my thoughts more concisely without tripping on my thoughts and mental thought which is largely from reading and writing weekly which I felt like I haven’t done in a while and am just now picking back up.

13 November 2021

For my research paper, I took on Guy Mcpherson and his radical beliefs on how the world is going to end by 2026. At first, I was extremely discouraged. Initially, I had also sided with his opinions and sources. During the early stages, I felt like a fool for even believing anything that he was saying but I didn’t know any better. I really did feel played by his title as a scientist and educator I thought that his work and studies were going to be credible but it wasn’t until I did my own research and went through his own citations that I began to realize how deceiving GuyMcphereson really is. This research paper taught me a valuable lesson in how to read scholarly articles and follow up on the proper use of citations. For the most part, I mildly knew how to read a scholarly article however I didn’t fully understand some of the parts but I knew just enough to figure out that Mcpherson was citing articles and stretching the information within them to make his work seem credible. To a person without the energy to look into his work, they would believe him to be a scholar simply bringing forth information to the people. But I did feel accomplished once I began diving into his sources.

For the most part, the writing came easy to me as I knew that I had strong counterarguments to his work but what did take me a while was properly citing all my information. I did use a citation machine but I knew that it never seems to properly cite the author’s names and I would frequently have to look back into the paper to find out who wrote it. I constructed my works cited page using MLA formation however, I want to get into more forms of citations such as Chicago style which really appeals to me as I would be able to keep everything in order and organized.

For the first time I believe in a while I actually felt like my work had some ground to it and really wanted to show it to my group mates to give them a sort of idea on how we can break down his argument because i knew they too had trouble in creating some sort of argument against his army of articles he cherry-picked. So I would say that in this phase i gained a new sense of social and collaborative writing to engage my peers in writing their papers. Not only was this phase kind of a social ice breaker for me but it was also sort of an eye-opener as I talked weekly with my group mates over zoom I realized that we are all similar in the sense that we share a connection on how we were feeling about all the assignments in other classes. I felt sort of assured that I’m not the only one having all sorts of anxious feelings.