The Outcome

         During this semester in English 11000 with Professor Matias I was able to achieve some of the learning outcomes that she had set up in the class. Even though there were some that I achieved there were also some that I was not able to achieve but I ended up understanding them. These learning outcomes are things that I can use in the future when reading or writing for any class or even in general.

         I learned a lot of new strategies when doing our phase one assignment; One learning outcome that I achieved was developing strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and writing. I was able to achieve this by completing some of the assignments that Professor Matias assigned to the class because they helped me organize my essay while I was writing it. I learned how to collaborate with my peers because of our peer reviews and I actually ended up learning something from my partner during a peer review which made me revise my essay and change into a whole different story than what I originally came up with. When it came to drafting, I had to break the essay up in to small parts which made the assignment a lot easier to complete and understand. This learning outcome ended up also helping me in future essays in this class, so it was essential that I learned in this first phase.

         The phase two assignment helped me explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations. To do this assignment I had to go through all the readings and videos that we were given in class and decide which one I can analyze.  When reading or writing I can now find forms of rhetoric or even use rhetoric in my own writing. I was especially able to do that in this phase by learning the different types of rhetoric and how it can be used which helped me understand it and made it easier to locate them when I am reading which I can now apply to different many different genres of texts. 

During the phase three assignment I was able to achieve one of the course learning outcomes which was “Locating research sources in the library’s databases or archives and on the internet and evaluate them for credibility, accuracy, timeliness, and bias.”. When completing these assignments, the first thing we had to do was find credible sources that we may use in our essay to support our opinion and I had trouble with this at first but as I kept looking, I was able to learn what makes a website credible and what does not and some examples of things that play a role are the domain, credentials, and time of publishing for sources. For this phase I was able to dwindle down the number of sources I was going to use for my essay by using some of those tactics when looking at websites or articles. For example, I started with a source from an aspiring sports editor when I realized the author of the article that I was reading did not put his actual name and put a username instead, so I ended up having to not use that source because it was not reliable. This something that can apply to everyday life when looking at any article or website because I can check for its credibility.

I was able to achieve some of the learning outcomes but not all of them, the learning outcomes that I was not able to achieve were “Recognize the role of language attitudes and standards in empowering, oppressing, and hierarchizing languages and their users, and be open to communicating across different languages and cultures”, “Recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations.”, “Engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes”, “Understand and use print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences”, “Compose texts that integrate your stance with appropriate sources using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation.”, and “Practice systematic application of citation conventions.”. I can say that even though I did not achieve these learning outcomes throughout this semester that I was able to understand them. For recognizing the role of language, I was able to understand that the way that people speak can affect how they are perceived. When dealing with the recognizing rhetorical terms and strategies in writing situations I was able to understand how to use rhetorical terms in my own writing. For engaging in collaborative aspects of the writing processes I understood this outcome when we did peer review because I had to collaborate with another person. When doing the understanding technologies to address a range of audience I was able to understand that people write things differently to appeal to different audiences. Lastly the learning outcome that I understood was practicing systematic application of citations because I had to use to this when I did the phase 3 assignment.

         With all these learning outcomes I was able to enhance my writing and reading skills. These learning outcomes will help me in my future life and in my future English classes so I would like to thank Professor Matias for making sure that we were able to understand these outcomes. It Is something I didn’t think would.be effecting my English skills because I thought I was already good, but these really influenced my writing and reading.