Taylor Christensen
English 2010
What Really Happened This Semester?
Who knows what happened this semester? I sure don’t. Most of this semester went by
so fast that I don’t remember everything, however I have evidence to show what I have
accomplished. Lone behold we started this semester picking a local topic that we wanted to
research and write about all semester long. I was picking between Legalization of Marijuana, as
well as The Rising Housing Market. A couple reasons that I didn’t chose the topic about
marijuana is first; I knew that there would be multiple people that would choose it. Second it
wasn’t something that directly affected me. This led me to pick “The Rising Housing Market.”
At the beginning of picking a topic, I had already formed my opinion/perspective about
my topic. My perspective came from my experience when looking to get approved for a
mortgage. As I started to research the rising housing market, my perspective became more
relevant. I knew that as I continued to do more research, I would be able to learn more about
when I buy a house, as well as when would be a good time to purchase a house. I do not
believe that my opinion of the housing market changed, however I do believe that my
perspective has opened up a bit more than what my closed mind was thinking. I didn’t have a
specific source that helped shape my perspective. What really set me to change my perspective
was a peer review of one of my drafts. The title of my article is “The Waiting Game.” In the
waiting game I talk about the market crashing and that I hope it happens so I can purchase a
house. The student commented on that section and said that she had purchased a house in the
last year and that it would suck if she was stuck in that house because of a recession. I
personally never thought about those that already own a house. That is why her comment
opened up my eyes and give me a new perspective on something that I wasn’t really open to.
I think that my website overall turned out pretty well. What helped the look of my
website was the different colors and designs of each page. Doing the different colors on the
pages gives it depth, as well as something easier and less bland to look at. The main reason
behind the articles and notebooks that I chose was because of the amount of time that I
needed to spend on them to get them finished. The shorter essays and notebooks made my
work/life balance a lot better.
As I look at the goals/future accomplishment that I set for English 2010, I am very
pleased to have been able to learn and grow as much as I did. The growth, from all the
experience and research I did helped me because I became better writer and researcher. Since
becoming a better researcher and writer, I will be able to use these in any career path that I
chose. This will also help me be able to write down what is left to do as well as write different
documents for others to understand. The last goal that I want to do is make sure that I write
more than I do now so that I can improve at a later date.
As I sat and pondered about which language and writing things are useful. My favorite
piece that I did is my power point. With this power point I was able to use both language and
writing to accomplish what I wanted to. I was able to read a couple magazines that allowed me
to be more open minded these two topics. At the beginning of the semester, I was not really
looking forward to it since these are my two worst subjects in school. I definitely used the
writing side this semester to help portray what the housing market really meant to me. I also
used my tone of voice, or in other words (language), to help portray what I wanted to in my
articles and notebooks.
Using rhetoric is still really hard for me, so I wasn’t able to use it as much in this class as I
thought that I was going to. Rhetoric will be something that I will be practicing outside of the
semester in order to help myself, my classmates, as well my mind working towards one of my
goals. Overall I really loved making my English 2010 portfolio of my in class work. This was
able to let me open up my mind, and give us some more things to explore. My specific strategy
I used was to get a lot of research done and provide a lot of value to those that will be reading
my articles. I really enjoyed this class, and learned a lot. As I continue to grow and practice my
writing and language skills, I am going to try and keep record of different things I do so that I
will be able to look back and accomplish more than what I thought.