This semester was very important and meaningful to me. Being a first-semester college student and mostly taking online classes wasn’t the experience that I always dreamed about but it is what we, unfortunately, had to go through. My expectations for this class at the beginning of the semester was that this class was similar to the English classes I took in my high school years however it became clear to me that it is a bit different. This class has motivated me to conduct my own research about topics and gather as much information about these topics in order to present a thorough yet informative and creative essay to my audience. This class also made me work on achieving a goal I’ve set from the beginning of the semester.  

My language and literacy narrative final was the first essay I got to write for this class. My language and literacy final allowed me to understand how my upbringing, experiences, and education had a great impact on my development and understanding of my language, literacy, and communication skills. I believe this was a good first essay because it made me better understand myself as a writer. It made me see where I was at in my writing journey. The goal that I set myself from the very beginning of the semester was to better my explanation skills. I’ve always had great ideas but when I come to present them I don’t get to express my idea to its fullest potential. I find myself mostly struggling with this issue when I’m called on in class to speak on something. I also find it particularly difficult to express my thoughts and feelings all the way through when it comes to writing essays. So I usually would jot down all of my thoughts and go back to rephrase the words to make proper sentences to form my essays. This class helped me to work on my goal of bettering my explanation skills by allowing me to face this issue head-on. So I Worked on these assignments and pushed myself to raise my hand as much as I could during class discussions. Doing this allowed me to finally achieve my goal. 

           At the beginning of the semester, I wasn’t familiar with how to present my research on a topic I was interested in. This unfamiliarity stems from my high school experience where I never was given the room to creatively conduct my research on any topic I wished for when it came to an assignment. The assignments which helped me better this issue were my discovery essay and my multimodal creative project. The discovery essay and multimodal creative project were both assignments that allowed me to discuss a very relevant topic that I never had the chance to talk about before but I have experienced. My topic was racism, and I concentrated on how it is seen in our culture, as well as how social media plays a significant role in it. I enjoyed how I was able to incorporate my creative pieces in my multimodal creative project. I chose this topic because it is something many of my audience including myself have faced.

Overall, this class taught me more than I had anticipated learning. It helped solve a goal that has helped me in many ways. This class has helped me to be creative and fluid with my language, literacy, and communication skills.