Outcome Four:
Reflect and Revise

Revision and reflection is a critical part of the composition process. The first draft of something should never be the final draft, as there is always room for improvement. That being said, it is also important to acknowledge what is working well in a project. 

 

Attending and engaging in peer workshops where I received peer and instructor feedback was extremely helpful. I wrote down feedback to guide how I revised my major projects. While I often took a majority of the feedback, there were certain things I negotiated. For example, Leah and I had a section of our podcast about the “Snow Queen”. During the workshop, we were told that we could potentially cut that part for time, since it was less relevant. We felt that the “Snow Queen” section enhanced our podcast. Instead of cutting it, we reformatted it to more clearly relate to our podcast theme of found families. We also used this section to mention multimodal aspects of Frozen. 

 

During the podcast project, I also practiced my analytical thinking skills. I had to think critically about a piece of media and ways it was effective, ways it connected with the audience, and potential issues of the media. Through working on the pitch presentations, I collaborated with my peers to make a fleshed out pitch. I also collaborated with Leah for the podcast, where we got to figure out technology together. Both experiences allowed me to practice effective communication and collaboration skills. 

 

I have already used some of the skills I have learned or grown from this course. While making a digital flier for the honors program, I thought about the spatial and visual modes and how they work together to effectively communicate information. For my “What is time?” final project, I transferred my essay to canva, formatting it to be like a newspaper article. I tried to take what I learned from my pitch bible assignment and apply it to my final. 

 

In the future, I know I will need to write cover letters, update my resume, write research and project summaries/proposals, as well as write for fun (poetry). The lesson we did on concision will specifically be helpful for me, as I am someone who loves to subconsciously write long sentences. 

 

Workshops were helpful, as it helped me get used to receiving and giving constructive feedback. This will be important later on, in both college, my career, and general life. Collaborating and working with others requires exchanges of feedback/ideas.

 

Learning audacity and getting more comfortable with canva will serve me well, as in the future I could see myself trying to edit audio for podcasts (I’m a part of a neural network podcast) or music. I also use canva a lot to make digital media and will likely need to in the future. 

Finally, I was able to connect projects for this class to my passion of diversity, equity, and inclusion. From the pitch bible aiming to foster ani-racism to calling out Frozen’s lack of diversity, I applied my lens of DEI to my approach on projects.