UWRITE has proven to be a writing intensive college course at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The course, at first, scared me because writing is not one of my strongest school skills. In the past, I have always been graded very critically when it comes to my writing classes. My spelling and grammar skills need some improvement. I was scared coming in because I was afraid this course would be just like all of my previous writing courses. I was wrong, this course was nothing like my previous classes. In UWRITE, I was not graded on my ability to spell and use accurate punctuation. This course was more about teaching how to get information across to an audience and not so much how you are supposed to offer up your information. UWRITE has five main learning objectives that incorporated throughout the course. The objectives help us, as students, learn what an excellent college essay should include. The learning objectives are; rhetorical knowledge, critical reading, composing processes, knowledge of conventions and critical reflection. Rhetorical knowledge is the basis of writing. It is the ability to look at a specific piece of linguistic work and to be able to analyze it. When you analyze the piece of literature you are pulling out different piece of information. Critical Reading is the ability to view a variety of pieces of literature and accurately criticizing the information and writing skills incorporated in the readings. The composing process is the use of multiple strategies to develop multi-modal projects. Knowledge of conventions provides writers with guidelines and rules to follow. The guidelines include mechanics, usage, spelling and citation practices. Critical reflection is the ability of the writer to be able to look back on their past experiences. Writers do this to apply their thoughts to their writing to enhance it.
The entire course of UWRITE consisted of four major projects. The four different projects were all individual projects, but they all came together into one big project at the end. The four different individual projects taught me a lot of valuable information and resources for future references. They all made me view literature differently. I am now able to pull out information that I would have previously looked right over. Even though they all came together as one to teach me an overall concept of how to produce a well college essay, I also learned individual lessons from the four portfolios. The Literacy Project was the first portfolio project that I conducted in my UWRITE class and I learned a great deal of insight on writing skills. Some of the great insight I have received from this project is the ability to know how to produce my own personal webpage. By learning how to conduct a webpage I was able to produce a webpage for the other three portfolio projects and also I was able to know the general skills to create a well rounded e-portfolio. During the Literacy Project, I also learned how my UWRITE course wanted my writing to appear. This helped me to know how to write my papers for the other projects in order for me to know how college writing was different than my high school writing. This one individual project also taught me how to be read other classmates literacy papers and analyze their papers. This helped me be able to draw connections between their papers and my own individual papers, so that I would be able to work in a group to produce some type of final product that represented how all of our individual papers related to one another. This skill helped me for future reference in the other three projects because in the other three projects I had to read my teammates papers and analyze each one to pull out similarities and differences. The next individual project was my Genre Project also added to my learned skill of analyzing things by adding the genres of movies. This Genre Project required me to pick and view a specific movie of my interest and then I had to be able to analyze the entire two hour and thirty minutes of the film. This taught me what I had to look for in movies when I was trying to analyze one. This helped me in reference to how I view movies in the real world more than it did when relating to the other projects. Once I analyzed the movie, I then had to once again analyze my fellow teammates movie reviews the write up on the movie they choose to analyze. This helped me learn exactly how movie genre can be similar to one another even if they are not considered in the same category as one another. I learned you are able to group movies together, by just what they simply speak discuss. The Genre Project did not only teach me about movies but it taught me how genres can be considered a variety of different categories even when it comes to writing styles. The Inquiry Project taught me how to look at a variety of different pieces of issue problems and how to find the one that mostly related to me. This helped me in the other projects because it helped me know how I could choose a topic to write about by looking back on things that I feel strongly about. I also learned how to search in a search bar on the internet to come up with reliable and relatable research that were articles on my topic of choice. This was a lot harder than I first expected it to be because I thought I could just type in a the main topic and article would pop up, that was not the case. I had to actually had to learn how to pick keywords out of a main topic to type into the search bar to find good evidence. This helped me in my other projects because it made me learn just how to pick keywords out of a broad topic to make my search a lot more in depth then it would be by just typing the topic in. The Argument Project went just along with the Inquiry Project because it taught me how to use information that I had previous conducted through research and to form an argument out of it. I learned how to look at prior research and know exactly what side of the argument I should argue based on which why my research supports. I also learned how to conduct an argument paper that was college writing quality because before I was just always told to state my argument then give support to back it up. This is not the case in college, you have to state your argument in an efficient way and give good factual reliable research that only supports your argument. I also had to restate my argument at the end of my paper. This Argument Project helped me with the other projects because I was about to look at all of my projects and figure out what all of the projects had in common and what they all taught me for my final portfolio. I really enjoyed my UWRITE course this semester! I learned a lot of great insight to the meaning of writing styles beyond just the basic spelling and grammar aspects. I am glad I had the opportunity to be in this class and to learn as much as I did without the red pen or penalty of spelling and grammar errors marked off on all my papers.
The entire course of UWRITE consisted of four major projects. The four different projects were all individual projects, but they all came together into one big project at the end. The four different individual projects taught me a lot of valuable information and resources for future references. They all made me view literature differently. I am now able to pull out information that I would have previously looked right over. Even though they all came together as one to teach me an overall concept of how to produce a well college essay, I also learned individual lessons from the four portfolios. The Literacy Project was the first portfolio project that I conducted in my UWRITE class and I learned a great deal of insight on writing skills. Some of the great insight I have received from this project is the ability to know how to produce my own personal webpage. By learning how to conduct a webpage I was able to produce a webpage for the other three portfolio projects and also I was able to know the general skills to create a well rounded e-portfolio. During the Literacy Project, I also learned how my UWRITE course wanted my writing to appear. This helped me to know how to write my papers for the other projects in order for me to know how college writing was different than my high school writing. This one individual project also taught me how to be read other classmates literacy papers and analyze their papers. This helped me be able to draw connections between their papers and my own individual papers, so that I would be able to work in a group to produce some type of final product that represented how all of our individual papers related to one another. This skill helped me for future reference in the other three projects because in the other three projects I had to read my teammates papers and analyze each one to pull out similarities and differences. The next individual project was my Genre Project also added to my learned skill of analyzing things by adding the genres of movies. This Genre Project required me to pick and view a specific movie of my interest and then I had to be able to analyze the entire two hour and thirty minutes of the film. This taught me what I had to look for in movies when I was trying to analyze one. This helped me in reference to how I view movies in the real world more than it did when relating to the other projects. Once I analyzed the movie, I then had to once again analyze my fellow teammates movie reviews the write up on the movie they choose to analyze. This helped me learn exactly how movie genre can be similar to one another even if they are not considered in the same category as one another. I learned you are able to group movies together, by just what they simply speak discuss. The Genre Project did not only teach me about movies but it taught me how genres can be considered a variety of different categories even when it comes to writing styles. The Inquiry Project taught me how to look at a variety of different pieces of issue problems and how to find the one that mostly related to me. This helped me in the other projects because it helped me know how I could choose a topic to write about by looking back on things that I feel strongly about. I also learned how to search in a search bar on the internet to come up with reliable and relatable research that were articles on my topic of choice. This was a lot harder than I first expected it to be because I thought I could just type in a the main topic and article would pop up, that was not the case. I had to actually had to learn how to pick keywords out of a main topic to type into the search bar to find good evidence. This helped me in my other projects because it made me learn just how to pick keywords out of a broad topic to make my search a lot more in depth then it would be by just typing the topic in. The Argument Project went just along with the Inquiry Project because it taught me how to use information that I had previous conducted through research and to form an argument out of it. I learned how to look at prior research and know exactly what side of the argument I should argue based on which why my research supports. I also learned how to conduct an argument paper that was college writing quality because before I was just always told to state my argument then give support to back it up. This is not the case in college, you have to state your argument in an efficient way and give good factual reliable research that only supports your argument. I also had to restate my argument at the end of my paper. This Argument Project helped me with the other projects because I was about to look at all of my projects and figure out what all of the projects had in common and what they all taught me for my final portfolio. I really enjoyed my UWRITE course this semester! I learned a lot of great insight to the meaning of writing styles beyond just the basic spelling and grammar aspects. I am glad I had the opportunity to be in this class and to learn as much as I did without the red pen or penalty of spelling and grammar errors marked off on all my papers.