Course Reflection

Joseph Wiggins
ENC 1102
12-3-2013

Course Reflection and Cover Letter        

              This semester I have seen a tremendous change in the way that I write.  This is the first time in quite a few years that I have felt I learned how to write better in a class and I think that it is in part because of the goals expressed in the course outcomes.  I believe that in writing this final piece I have successfully achieved some of these outcomes. 

               One outcome specifically that I believe was demonstrated very well through this process is outcome 2 which states that students will engage in a meaningful, dynamic, and inquiry-based research process.  Through the research planning and gathering sections I believe that I achieved this as is shown through the methods section of my final portfolio as well as through the literature review.  In the methods I describe how I “conducted a survey in order to learn a basic set of information…” as well as how I “chose a focus group from those initial survey participants and conducted a group discussion…” This clearly demonstrates outcome 2 because of the way that I utilized multiple kinds of evidence from various sources.  Using both a survey and a discussion allowed me to receive different kinds of information from participants and allowed me to better study my topic and draw conclusions from the results.  I further demonstrate the achievement of this outcome within the literature review section of the paper, where I demonstrate the various sources that I analyzed through library research which was crucial to learning what has been said previously in the conversation as well as to set up the context of my piece.

               Another of the outcomes that I feel I achieved well was outcome 4 which states students will produce complex, analytic, persuasive arguments that matter in academic contexts.  One section that stands out to me where I demonstrate this quite well is in my literature review where I analyze competitiveness as the cause of aggression and study done by authors Puri and Pugliese.  I explain how “the study found that the players showed more aggressive tendencies after playing the action game” and I move forward with their findings creating a complex argument drawn from those findings by stating “the action games are more competitive in nature than the role playing games and therefore it can be concluded that the competition of the games is the major factor that causes aggression.”  The argument that I present here involved the examination of the evidence presented in this study which allowed me to draw the conclusion and argument that I did from it.

               Outcome 3 (students will read, analyze, and synthesize complex texts and incorporate multiple kinds of evidence purposefully in order to generate and support their writing) is another that I feel I achieved in the process of writing this final paper.  It is clearly shown throughout the entire literature review, considering that is the purpose of it, but there is a section where I feel I demonstrate it specifically well and that is in the final paragraph just before the conclusion of the literature review.  Through the entire paragraph I wrap up the previous section.   I compare Ivory and Kastle’s work to Baumeister’s work and synthesize their ideas in this section by stating “some took a specific aspect of the violent content and studied… profanity” which refers to Ivory and Kaestle and went on to say “others looked at violent content … [and] studied how it affected players when it was posed differently” which refers to Baumeister.  I continued and compared their findings even going as far as to analyze which work brings up more significant results, but how they both relate to each other still in order to highlight the conversation between texts and ideas which supported my goals in the overall context of the conversation for my final paper.

               A final outcome that I believe I achieved quite well and, for me, really demonstrated my own growth as a writer over the course of the semester, is outcome 5 which states, “students will develop flexible strategies for revising, editing, and proofreading writing.”  I definitely demonstrated an achievement of this outcome over the semester through my many revisions of the major pieces of the paper, namely the literature review and the methods sections.  My literature review went through 4 revisions and the major issue that was brought to my attention by instructor feedback was the source to source writing that I was doing rather than idea to idea.  In the beginning of almost every paragraph I started with an author’s name.  One in particular, to serve as an example, originally started with “Baumeister and his colleagues however, studied how violence in prosocial situations affected players of games” and when I received feedback about the source to source problem, it was rewritten as “Violence in prosocial situations is another interesting specific in the violent video game world and some looked into how it affected players of games” allowing for the idea to lead the conversation of the next source, rather than the source leading the idea.  This was done with each of the paragraphs through the section to move with the ideas being the focus instead of the sources.  The methods section itself is hard to cite here considering it had a complete overhaul, but what originally I had done, was to describe the steps of the surveys and the focus group together (participant selection described for both, then the actual use of both, and finally, the process of carrying out both) all in one, and when I received feedback about the disjointed feel of it, I essentially rewrote the methods section as two consecutive pieces.  I changed it so that I wrote the methods of the surveys and then wrote another methods section describing the focus group discussion.  The feedback I received about these pieces effectively taught me how to develop strategies for revising and editing.

               As I stated before, this is the first time in a very long time that I have felt as though I have truly improved in my writing abilities.  I think that by following these course outcomes and effectively demonstrating an ability to follow them proves this improvement and I do feel that I have done that with this final paper.