Mid-Term Reflection - 08 October 2019
The Power of a Growth Mindset: As Shown Throughout My Development in this Course
The first idea that we were introduced to in this class was “Yet vs Not Yet” as put forward by Dweck in her presentation, The Power of Believing that You Can Improve. This was a very important concept for us to get acquainted with as began our college writing journey. There will be a time when we won’t get the grade we want our get out ideas across the way in which we want to. Before I was never really someone who would go back and edit my work extremely. I would finish what I needed to and then turn it in and never think about it again. However, now, I really want to put my best work forward. I have been thinking about how I write more in my daily life. I found myself paying attention to writing styles and organization of the books that I read personally or the articles I read online. I have been thinking about what I would have done if I was in their position and I have been appreciating good writing more.
"I have been thinking about how I write more in my daily life. I find myself paying attention to writing styles and organization of the books that I read personally or the articles I read online."
Vanderbilt’s Metacognition has helped me to become more aware. This concept has carried over into my ideas of my Immersion Experience. Before going into my experience I was thinking about how I was going to organize my piece. What would be the focus of my narrative? My immersion experience was to go to a haunted house. Since I am a very easily frightened person I thought that it would be interesting to keep track of my thoughts and feelings when putting myself through one of my fears. The haunted house that I went to had three “chapters” or sections of the haunted house to go through. I thought that it would be a good decision to organize my narrative section of the paper into three sections as well.
We also discussed the best choices for introductions in class which I found to be very informative. I have always struggled to write an eye-catching and interesting introduction that stood out from others. We discussed starting in media res so as to catch the audience’s attention, but I thought that it would be best in my case to start from the beginning. With my immersion experience, the feeling of anticipation and fear before you go inside the haunted house is just as important as when you have begun the experience. How you feel before affects how you feel during.
Now before this class, I had never experimented with genres other than Academic research papers and essays for class. This is the first time that I will be talking about myself and my experiences in my writing. At first, this prospect was daunting, but as I have started my writing and research, I find that I enjoy journalistic nonfiction. I never considered myself to be a creative person or a writer able to create my own stories. I am not very knowledgeable of the expectations of the genres that I am writing in but I think that my immersion experience article is going to be a bit too personal and “me” centered for typical feature style narrative. I am focusing on my experiences and how I feel during the event not on anyone else. I do not know if this is a very good idea in the long run but I like where it is going right now.
I think that my writing has already grown through the tools and concepts introduced to me in the past few weeks. I have become more organized with my annotating of the readings and keeping track of my ideas and where I feel myself being drawn to for my pieces. I have started paying more attention to the audience of my writing more. In my previous writing classes, I was told that my ideas were not developed in a way easily understood by the audience. My thought process during my writing was “Well that makes sense to me so they should understand it too”. However, now I am trying to be more descriptive and articulate with my explanations and ideas. I still have a lot more progress to make but I have been progressing no matter how minutely, which is very good.
I still have a lot of goals that I wish to achieve during the rest of the semester and in my subsequent writing classes. I want to become a very good writer, like all of those extraordinary intelligent kids in my class who always knew the perfect word to choose. Now, I am not saying I want to be exactly like them. I want to be myself and for my writing to be looked fondly at and not pitied for being so poorly written. I am dedicated to making progress and learning as much as I can.
