Looking back, I never fully anticipated being in a class that felt so abstract yet left me with a sense of curiosity and unfinished business. Although I was able to succeed in this literacy course, I wish I had developed a stronger ability to shift more comfortably into professional writing, critically analyze texts, and write argumentative essays with greater confidence in expressing my ideas. As I reflect on my progress throughout the course, I recognize that the academic guidance and practical advice provided by Professor Harris were meaningful and beneficial to my development as a college-level writer. Being given the opportunity to evaluate whether the responsibilities and expectations placed on me contributed to both personal and academic growth allowed me to better understand the areas where I still need improvement. This reflection is essential when learning how to enter a productive writing mindset and continue improving through researching, reading, drafting, revising, and editing effectively. One challenging but unavoidable realization was that I am still developing my critical thinking skills. While no one is perfect, I recognize that it would have benefited me to spend more time strengthening my reading and writing abilities and to be more proactive throughout the semester. However, as this was my very first semester in college, the transition from high school is overwhelming at times. If I were to start all over again on the first day of class, I would push myself to focus more, engage more deeply, and better prepare for the challenges ahead.

One central learning stage I recall was the cultural profile interview essay which was both unique and meaningful. For the first time, I had to engage directly with someone, ask thoughtful questions, and shape my writing around their experiences. It was a full circle moment for me. The process of it helped me better understand another person’s beliefs, culture, upbringing, values and emotions showing me how personal and powerful writing can be and ways to approach writing in that I had to think more deeply to ensure my ideas flowed naturally with my interviewee’s responses. I learned to rethink structure, clarity, and flow, rather than only fixing grammar different from the traditional writing I was used to. Listening to my interviewee’s responses and translating that into real emotional words made me want to cultivate thoughtful paragraphs and adapt my language to closely fit the purpose of the assignment to the reader. This instilled a rhetorical approach that emphasized empathy, allowing me to convey emotion and better connect with my audience. As the first essay of the course, it was a motivating beginning that reshaped how I engaged with writing moving forward.

When it comes back to the digital community essay, this second essay felt a bit more manageable, a viable opportunity to intrigue the reader to find an interesting topic to discuss about. It was doable because it granted me the free will to develop a clear stance on any community and do research on them to figure out what to use as logical evidence. I came to a decision to write about the Sora AI community which took a viral hit on TikTok. There I analyzed users interacting with controversial AI-generative media, an experiment that has gone out of control and has been badly and well received by celebrities and the general public. It was clear to see the potential of something worth arguing for when coming up with a thesis statement. But as I go through my writing process, I was bewildered to follow critical rules, such as catering to the what, how and so what writing strategy, utilizing an analytical tone in my evidence based research essay and to self assess myself in key areas of weaknesses to find room for improvement as I write. If not for Professor Harris, writing and researching would’ve been harder to pave the way for me to think more analytically instead of summarizing main points. By doing that, I was able to examine specific patterns through a community member’s actions, behavior or rhetoric and then deep into the what, how and why it is that community functions the way it does which helped me explain myself apart from surface-level description.

On top of that, I had managed to complete from what I got through many ups and downs with the visual social multimedia essay. Some of the very skills I’ve learned somewhat were to read the assignment description carefully in which I could draft my essay outline before writing full paragraphs. I was not particularly fond of the topic that I was going for because not only did it involve a sentimental social phenomenon but cultural issues that dismissed certain racial stereotypical stigmas surrounding an incident that has occurred for a while in the media. The context explored was significant but totally unrelated to my own personal struggles and upbringing since I was trying to reach this message to a completely distinct audience opposite of my identity. Having to form a well thought out and powerful story for my advertisement. But my thought process caused me to remember how to begin this work. So, thanks to Professor Harris, she reminded us that it was essential that we begin brainstorming how the design of the media to be used will look like for this assignment. With having that intent, this gave me time to focus on the overall meaning of the community that’s being reached out, communicating social issues in powerful and innovative ways. This helped me move beyond simply describing the community and instead analyze how design choices influence meaning and audience engagement.

Assignments have revealed to me that no matter how good an essay sounds or how many paragraphs you have, if it didn’t necessitate meeting the needs or meeting the criteria for that written work, it all counts towards the final grade and that grade made me feel helpless and puzzled. Whenever we were given back our work for our in class essays, I had to understand that the workload I was accountable for and the use of AI being prohibited. So it was all thanks to Professor Harris, who taught us that first drafts can be pretty shitty and catered to the what, how and the why as a way to demonstrate and have ingrained the method to analyze and reel in the deeper significances, the effects it had on the reader, and how to evaluate certain strategies to strengthen our argument given how she puts it.