Reflection

Dear reader,

Upon arriving at Coastal Carolina University I was frightened to say the least. While the previous months had yielded nothing but excitement for the new opportunity that lay ahead, the moment I actually reached my new school I was met with an anxious uncertainty. It wasn’t just a new school I had to get accustomed to, I was also going in with a brand new major, switching from business administration to communication. 

As is the case with many things I get myself all worked up for, it ended up being something I did not have to worry about. My experience on campus in my first few weeks was nothing shy of positive in and out of the classroom. I certainly gravitated toward this class the most, due to my interest in writing. The way this class was structured was very different compared to the English classes I had taken before. I learned to become a process writer rather than creating my final essays completely from scratch which, as you can see from browsing my site, has been monumentally helpful to me. I think back to creating my Autoethnography most often. It was the second major assignment in the class, but it didn’t carry the same stress that most important writing assignments do. We were tasked with creating an annotated bibliography before even starting the autoethnography drafting process. As a result of that, I already had all of the sources I was going to use for the assignment beforehand. The annotated bibliography allowed me to really become familiar with the sites and mediums I used to help give credibility to my work. Next came the first draft which was a very freeing writing experience. I conducted an interview with my aunt to get another person’s perspective of the baseball game I attended and wrote about my experience there. All that was left to do was combine my sources and quotations with my narrative of the event and parts of my interview. Had I tried to start my final autoethnography from scratch rather than writing it in steps, the final product would have been wildly inferior. 

This experience was very much similar to the rest of the writing assignments we had in class. Sometimes I would be starting an assignment with which I had no idea what it would evolve into. If you had told me that answering questions about a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young performance would be the precursor for a well detailed rhetorical analysis of a protest song I would have certainly given you a funny look. This leads me to another lesson this course has taught me; the final product may look nothing like the final submission… and that's okay. Writing from many different angles and styles almost ensures that the end product will be well rounded and much more interesting. While the effect this class has had on my writing has been nothing short of profound, I think the thing I keep coming back to the most is the process. Life is naturally an uphill battle and it is often that we forget to compartmentalize certain aspects of our lives. It can compound into something that is overwhelming to certain people, myself included. If we put more onus on doing everything in life as a process rather than one huge task, I think we would all find the human experience much more enjoyable. Maybe I should “trust the process” after all. 

Thank you very much for viewing my site. I hope it was informative and at the very least, mildly interesting. 

-Liam