I have learned a lot about different topics in this English
class so far this year including rhetoric, writing, and research. Honestly, coming into this class, I had no
idea what the word rhetoric even meant, but now I know a lot about it and what
it is. I’ve learned that from birth we
are exposed to a lot of it – in magazines, on posters or billboards, on TV or
in movies, and even in conversations or in the way people dress. All of these things affect you and shape your
opinions and ideas as you grow older.
I also learned a lot about
writing. I’ve always been a horrible
writer. I’m still not too good at it,
but I’ve improved a lot since I started taking this class. I’ve learned a lot of different techniques
for writing papers in class and by reading the book. Things like learning how to write an annotated
bibliography and an outline for my papers has really helped me. I normally just sit down and write my paper
from beginning to end which has always been difficult for me, but using these
planning techniques has really helped me progress in my writing.
Another thing that I’ve learned a
lot about in this class is researching and how to research. When writing papers in high school, I would
usually search what I was looking for in Google and just use one of the search
results as a source. In this class, I’ve
learned that there are more sources than just books and websites. I never knew that there were databases where
you could search for specific articles and things like that, or that you could
use things like interviews as sources.
Also, I’ve learned better ways to keep track of my sources, which I have
never been good at. Now I know various
ways to record them so I don’t use the information and forget where I got it from.
All of the things I’ve learned in this class so
far will be very useful when doing other assignments for this class and for
other classes. I will use the new research
techniques to help me with my research for other papers and lab reports and
hopefully it will make them easier to write and cite sources for. I will use what I’ve learned about writing in
other classes throughout school and even in circumstances after college. Overall, I have learned a lot of things in
English class that I can apply to other classes, assignments, and even
situations later in life.
