Growth and Process:

I began this semester with knowledge of Highschool writing and I feel I had general knowledge of MLA formatting and had basic writing skills. During the semester I’ve gained an understanding of the different writing projects such as the Literacy Narrative, Rhetorical Analysis and the Research Paper. I’ve also learned how to correctly write citations. I believe I wrote citations a few times during high school. I’m also confident that my writing process has improved since the beginning of the semester. Creating multiple drafts for projects has helped me develop my confidence and clarity in writing. Especially with my Research paper and Advocacy project. I had multiple paragraphs of the same section of my paper before I wrote a final draft. My advocacy project I wrote multiple times what each section would have and the wording of the paragraphs till I was happy with what I had. My Research paper challenged me the most because I’ve never written a Research paper before. I’ve only written essays during my time in high school and most would be short essays. This assignment pushed me to write longer paragraphs as well. I had a hard time writing these longer paragraphs than what I was used to because I only had to have 5 sentences for a paragraph to be a paragraph. 

Voice and Identity: 

My culture and background has influenced most of my work in this course because I’m Navajo and come from a family of artists. Being Navajo and growing up on the reservation I feel I had a lot I could include into my work that connects and brings more perspective to the assigned work. In some of my journals and writing assignments I mentioned my experiences with family and language. Using these experiences and what I’ve written about I connect them into other assignments in class and outside of class. For example I used what I've learned about language to write about the decline in the Navajo language for my Advocacy project. The journals we did during class have helped strengthen my writing voice by reflecting on experiences, thoughts and ideas. This has also helped me write drafts for projects. Empathy mapping has helped me brainstorm ideas and I think mapping out projects using this method has improved my planning skills in writing because I can see my plan visually. Group discussions help shape my perspective by hearing other people's experiences and thoughts about certain topics. It’s interesting to hear what others have to say and has helped me understand the topic more.

Critical Thinking and Research:

I learned about the different types of logical fallacies and rhetorical strategies. It was really interesting learning about these persuasion methods, where they can be used especially in commercials and social media posts. Learning how to analyze these benefited my understanding in supporting my arguments in my writing. My ability to read sources for research has evolved because I know how to identify the claim/argument and if the source is reliable. My analyzing skills evolved by evaluating the authors, the information and its evidence. As well as the authors perspective on the topic as some authors may be biased towards the topic. By using these skills I can integrate these sources into my research and writing by using some of the information to support my own claim/argument. What surprised me about conducting research with the sources was how hard it was trying to find reliable sources that support my argument against Generative-AI. A lot of sources are in support of it, mainly for the smaller tasks that can help workers.