I learned a lot from this class and my writing skills greatly improved. The skills learned and built upon in this class will be useful for the rest of my life.
The design project was a project that was intended to be a practice for future assignments in order to help us to gain the skills that we needed for the rest of the class. We chose a restaurant to advertise for, and designed a newspaper ad and a radio announcement. The ad helped me to realize that this was not a class for conventional papers. I realized that writing is actually very versatile and that there are many mediums through which you can communicate your points.
The research stage of this class was to help us gain the base knowledge about the Middle East that we would need to incorporate into our writing for this class. This is also the step in which we picked our topics for all of our other papers. There were many assignments that we had to do that helped me to further understand my topics. This portion of the class was very important and enabled me to learn about the Middle East so that I could write intelligently about it.
The annotated bibliography was an assignment in which we gathered sources that we had previously researched in order to organize our knowledge base for our writing. I had not done anything like this before, I always gathered my sources as I wrote rather than doing it previously. However, this assignment really helped to understand what research writing is all about and I learned that it is important to learn the material and cite your sources before you write, it saves time later.
The hardest assignment for me in this class was the profile assignment. Even though I had picked my topics for all of my papers already, I found it difficult to apply that topic into the profile style of writing. It wasn't until after my other two papers were written that I could finally decide on how to approach the topic. For this assignment, I explored a different medium. I chose to use a photo story application so that the visuals accompany the audio files. Through this assignment, I learned that not all styles of writing are applicable to all topics and that it can be very hard to pick a topic that matches the style.
The evaluation and proposal papers were the closest assignment to what I was already used to. I had taken classes that required these styles of writing already, so it wasn't all that difficult to figure it out. It was challenging to find sources that had defined criteria for the problem that I chose to explore, so I had to define my own based on my own analysis of the problem. Because of this, got more out of my solution because it met all of my criteria. It was also very interesting to explore previous attempts to solve this problem and to research why they failed. A problem that I encountered while writing was containing my writing to the requested length. I had so much material to cover in my paper that I had to be very brief and concise in how I explained the history of the issue. From these assignments, I learned the importance of being concise in explaining lengthy issues.
I think that the process for making our Public Service Announcement, although it worked, could have gone a lot better. Too often, our planning meetings were sidetracked by irrelevant tangents that made it hard to get things done. One thing that my group did well, was to get to class early to work on our public service announcement. This enabled us to get things done ahead of schedule and with minimal stress. I feel that we could have done better to work as a group in putting all of our images and audio together. Our voice recording and pictures were sent to David Barlow to compile and he did not follow the plan that we had discussed as a group. Our images are out of order and he added annoying music to it. In spite of all this, I think that our message was still communicated effectively and that it was a success.
In conclusion, this was a great class and I learned many things that I will use for the rest of my life.
