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Reflection

Coming into Writing 5 this term, I was extremely scared about the course as well as my writing ability. In high school, there was not much of an emphasis on writing and I believe that the writing that I have done in high school did not prepare me enough for college writing. On top of this, I took two gap years without having to write any academic papers or analyzing any readings. Therefore, I felt that I would not be ready for college writing and that it would take me some time to adjust back to academic writing. In the beginning of the course, I struggled with analyzing the required readings and composing my writing responses. However, throughout this course, I was able to gradually learn to become a better writer through new techniques that I have learned. One skill that I have learned and am still developing is reverse outlining all of my ideas. Reverse outlining has helped me a lot throughout my writings in this course, as it gave me the opportunity to organize everything that I had written and make it connect back to my central theme of the paper. Prior to this class, I had not done a great job at connecting my ideas throughout my essays. Therefore, reverse outlining is something that I hope to continue using and developing to keep my writings consistent. Through peer-review activities and one-on-one conferences, I learned that many of my writings lose track of sight and did not directly relate to my thesis statement. I realized that by reverse outlining, I would be less inclined to do so because I would be constantly returning to my paper and clearly relating the issues that my paper is addressing. In doing so, my paper will be more structured and be more cohesive overall. Another writing approach that I have learned in my Writing 5 class is word dumping and how this can be very helpful. Upon seeing the expected page length of a paper, I always get nervous whenever I see a paper over 6 pages, but I have not written many papers over this limit. From the “Shitty First Draft” article that we had to read for class, I learned that first drafts are essentially that, a first draft that is not intended to be a final draft. While keeping this in my mind, I also learned to not restrict myself in the first draft, but to keep typing all that I can type and edit the paper afterwards in order to make the essay more clear and cohesive. Through these two approaches that I have developed and still am developing, I realized that essays are more manageable for me now and that even though it seems daunting at first, through proper editing and additions, writing is not as difficult as I thought it was.

The writing approaches that I have developed in my writing 5 class have really helped me see the art of writing. Writing has a very structural, logical, and chronological form that I did not really investigate much in high school. High school writing classes did not teach me how to properly write essays. For my thesis statements, I wrote what was necessary, but looking back upon them, I realize that they were not really developed well. My topic sentences in relation to them were also very generic and did not provide any new information to the paragraph. However, through this class, I realized that the thesis statement and topic sentences are essential components to an essay and can make or break the whole essay. Therefore, going forward, I will continue keeping my eye out for my thesis statement and my topic sentences and the relationship between the two. This writing 5 course has given me many translatable tools I will be able to use in other courses at Dartmouth. One big issue that I have always had in writing is making my writing clear and concise. I tend to be very verbose when writing and have noticed that this has been an issue for some time. Through this course, I have learned to be a bit more concise in my word choice and be clearer in my writing. Reserve outlining will also be an extremely useful tool that can be applied to any subject because it is universal in keeping my arguments direct and clear. For all types of writing, these are essential skills to perfect. Although I still cannot write perfectly concise essays, it is a process that I am working towards achieving and have made huge strides in doing so this term.

To learn these skills from my writing course, I needed to do many different literacy practices in this course, which greatly satisfied the course objectives. We initially read and analyzed the different aspects of diversity and inclusion, like home, recognition, and genre. After these scholarly articles that complicated the meaning of each of the words, we had to write a response in regard to each of the topics, allowing me to have a better grasp of the term and its relationship to diversity and inclusion. Throughout each of these short writing assignments, I was able to improve my ability to craft strong and supportable claims. After these short writing assignments, we moved on to working on the major projects for the course. Our first project was a concept autobiography where we had to use a term that connects with diversity and inclusion and describe how it relates to our personal life. Through this autobiography, I learned more about the meaning of misrecognition and how it relates to the formation of my identity, as well as, inclusion and diversity. Our next project was a campus ethnography about Dartmouth. In this project, I continued off of my concept of misrecognition and how other Asian American Dartmouth students also feel about it. Through this project, I was able to continue developing my ability to create a complex issue and my ability to clearly and concisely develop an argument to support it. Our last major project was a research paper about the holistic misrecognition of Asian Americans in society based on societal, economic, and educational factors. In this project, I once again was able to work on my ability to create a strong claim and support it with evidence. In addition to this, I was able to assess the validity of academic journals and use them in conversation with each other, as well as my own ethnography, to broaden my concept of misrecognizing Asian Americans. In high school, I never did a research project having scholars in conversation with each other, but rather, just used them as a way to support of my claim. Therefore, this course was extremely helpful in exposing me to the array of different genres of writing, like the concept autobiography, ethnography, and research paper and how to approach each one of them.

The main object of this course was to give us students the opportunity to learn about writing as a form of expression used to address social injustices in the world. From this course, I learned about the different terms, like misrecognition, home, identity, etc, that relate to inclusion and diversity. These terms have given me a way to complicate how I see diversity and inclusion. Through our concept autobiography, ethnography, and research paper, I have learned a lot more about the misrecognition of Asian Americans and how that manifests not only in me, but also the people around me. I knew of this lack of diversity and recognition in Asian Americans prior to this class, however, this class also made me rethink my thoughts and look further into different aspects of diversity and inclusion. Before this class, I thought of inclusion and diversity as just a means of getting minority and disadvantaged people of color an opportunity to be included into mainstream media, politics, etc. However, I now realize that although this is true in most situations, inclusion also means incorporating people of more privilege into spaces of minority groups and having a variety of different ideas incorporated. Often, I find myself self-segregating myself into certain groups that I feel comfortable with, leaving me too comfortable in these groups, but also leaving me feeling completely out of place outside of these groups. Therefore, as a scholar writing about inclusion and diversity, I challenge myself to step out of my comfort zone and be that person who makes a space for underrepresented people like myself in mainstream media.

I believe that I grew tremendously as a writer throughout the course of this term. I have developed a better sense on the of writing in general and the road map that an essay is supposed to follow and address. Starting off with the introduction, I learned that it should provide a context for the whole essay and its objectives. When citing scholars in the essay, this is a good time to introduce them briefly and their relationship to the essay. Introductions should also be kept as brief as possible because it does not address the main argument that the following body paragraphs will. Within the introduction, there is a thesis statement for an essay that should be the glue tying the whole essay together. The most important tip that I learned about a thesis statement is that it must be an arguable claim that I would need to justify throughout the rest of my paper. The thesis statement also does not always have to be at the end of the introduction, but can also be elsewhere instead. The next important part in an essay that I have grown to develop are topic sentences. Prior to this class, I thought that I could craft solid topic sentences that would introduce the paragraph and also smoothly connect back to my thesis statement. However, I learned that my topic sentences, in general, did not achieve either of these objectives. One tip about topic sentences that I have learned is that throughout an essay, the topic sentences should have a good flow as to what the essay is going to be about. In creating great topic sentences, a reader should be able to get a general sense of what the whole paper is going to be about just from reading the topic sentences. I am still trying to learn more about writing and develop my writing ability. Therefore, I hope that I will continue using the skills that I have learned from my writing 5 course in my future writing assignments and beyond.