Reflective Post

Dear Reader,
This semester in English 201 I have participated in some very interesting projects and learned a lot from my experiences. The project that I enjoyed the most that made this class unique was the Public Sphere Day activity that everyone had to participate in. I believe that this was enjoyed by most even though at times very frustrating and time consuming. Public Sphere Week was helpful because it helped me to understand the “public sphere” that we were to learn about in this course. I am a hands-on learner and for me to be able to experience this first hand instead of being lectured to really helped me to comprehend better. I learned a lot about my community and the people who live here. They want things to be simple and less time consuming. They did not want to spend their time stopping at our booths on Public Sphere Day because they knew that we would be asking something from them. Many people’s response to getting involved with an organization or volunteering their time was “I don’t have time for that.”
Seeing this made me open up my eyes to relate this to my other classes. When I look back on the readings that we had to read for this class I noticed that good writers get straight to the point and do not beat around the bush because this is what draws the reader away. This is one thing that I have tried to improve in my writing. I have enhanced my writing by getting straight to the point and giving great details to back up my position. With these improvements I have also been working to improve my thesis statements. I have worked to make them more grabbing and to sum up my whole paper in one sentence. One area of my writing that could use the most improvement would be staying on topic and putting my thoughts into words. I feel that often times I know what I want to write about but when I go to do it I get off topic and do more telling instead of showing. This is an area that I have always struggled with but believe that it is improving with time.
Having made these changes and looking back on my writing, I believe that my annotated bibliography was my best work of the semester. I put a tremendous amount of time and effort into this assignment because I knew that it was important for my Public Sphere Day project. I spend several hours downtown walking around and interviewing store owners about how they believe their business is doing. I did enjoy doing this because I was able to learn about businesses I had never heard of and I was also given free samples of food to try!
If I could change one thing from this course I would have picked a different topic for Public Sphere Day because it was hard for me to get good research and persuade people to make a difference. There wasn’t a good group for me to join which made it hard to get a group of people together who wanted to save downtown. Overall, I really enjoyed this course and was glad that I was able to have Dr. Micer as a teacher!

Melissa Martin