Lauren HodsonEnglish 1103Julie CookDecember 12, 2013Final ReflectionThis year I have learned so much about myself through the writing and the reading that I have done in this English class. However, I am still struggling. I came into this class really struggling with being a perfectionist. I’ve always struggle with it, it’s something that cripples me and thought I have grown so much, and I don’t think I have overcome it. It’s really easy for me to sink back into my chair and check out if something isn’t perfect. I realized I was doing it this year and it continued all the way up into my portfolio. I have this fear of failing in my writing and if I don’t think I can do it perfectly then I don’t do it at all…. Or I wait until the last minute.One of the things that has benefited me in this area was actually at the beginning of the year. We learned about good vs. bad writing. This is an area that I am still struggling with because my whole life I have been taught about good and bad writing. However, it’s nice knowing that I can’t exactly write anything bad as long as what I am writing is in line with my intended goal or what is expected of me. This has helped me because I don’t feel as much anxiety as writing perfect. I just have to follow the rules and make sure that I am keeping my thoughts in line. Having said that, I think now would be a good time to say that my favorite reading so far was the reading by Anne Lamott. It was called ‘shitty first drafts’. She says at the beginning that “all good writers do them”. I love that. We had talked about good vs. bad writing at the beginning of the year and then Anne says that all GOOD writers do them. She’s referring to shitty first drafts. I want to say again that in her writing she says all GOOD writers write BAD first drafts. This was so comforting to read. Throughout this reading I realized that bad shouldn’t be an outcome because it’s all a part of the process. The process is never perfect so it was reassuring to know that I shouldn’t be striving for perfection I should just be going through the process and making sure that every step I do leads to my intended outcome. Looking back, I am really glad that I was given the opportunity to do 4 different drafts of my portfolio because if I wasn’t, then I probably would have been sitting here today not knowing what to do with my portfolio. Steps. It’s all about the steps and the purpose. This year that’s what I have learned. I look back on my in class notes that I have written and the free responses. I look back on the really really long readings that we were forced to read and then my responses to them. All of that changed and got better over time. I realized that my notes lead to understanding in my free writesand my free writes led to a good foundation for my reading responses. All of the practice from those things enabled me to have a good perspective on what we learned about in order to write my literacy vignettes and my unsettled business posts. I’ve gotta say, the unsettled business posts were my least favorite but they were the most beneficial. I hated doing them because if I don’t know something then I really don’t know it. Having to write about things that I didn’t understand required so much work because I really didn’t understand them at all. However, through writing the unsettled business posts, I learned about what I was unsure of simply because I had to really think about what I was unsure of in thefirst place, which gave me an entirely different view on the matter. Furthermore, it was the sameLauren HodsonEnglish 1103Julie CookDecember 12, 2013with the peer reviews. Our Literacy Inquiries combined everything that we have learned about this year into one. We had to write in different forms about one topic but we had to reflect and learn at the same time. This was honestly a really hard assignment but it taught me a lot. I had to get used to learning through my writing instead of just writing about what we learned, which is something that we had to do all year. The peer reviews at the end of the assignment were so challenging. It’s really hard to give my classmates comments on their writing when I don’t even feel that mine is adequate enough. It was difficult because I did not want to give them any feedback that wouldn’t be useful. It was pretty stupid for me to feel that way because it is alwayseasier to give other people input on their work than it is our own. So it would have been helpful to really take advantage of that and work through some things in that area. “In the term discourse communities, the focus is on the texts and language, the genres and lexis that enable members throughout the world to maintain their goals, regulate their membership, and communicate efficiently with one another.” This quote is by Ann Johns. I feel like my writing reflects this quote a lot but in a lot of different perspectives. In order to be a writer I have to write. So I can’t let my perfectionism get in the way of me writing because if I don’t write then I won’t have that Discourse and I won’t be able to learn from it. I feel like I am still letting my fears of not doing something the right way get in the way of me writing. This course has really helped me with that but I don’t feel that I am there yet. All of my writing from this year has been a process, which relates back to the shitty first draft. I feel like the beginning of my notes and free writes represents my shitty first draft and everything that I was learning at that time but including my preconceptions of the ideas. As time goes by I can tell that my writing became more insightful and shows that I was really working through some ideas. My literacy inquiry represents my third draft to me because I was taking all of these ideas and working through them in a way that allowed me to pick the most important thing and write about it in a way that would teach me even more. My portfolio is now an opportunity to have a really good final draft by putting all of my shitty steps together in the most perfect way possible and making something really great out of