Finding Room in my Heart for Writing
Last spring semester, I took a preparatory writing course -WRA 1004- here at MSU. When I first enrolled myself to this course (WRA 110), I expected it to be completely different than WRA 1004. I expected this course to be concentrated about scientific and technological topics, which means we will be writing/reading a lot of research papers. Nevertheless and fortunately, it was not the case. In the first period, my professor told us that this class is like any other WRA 1** course where the professor can choose whatever topics he/she wants. She then introduced us to the project we will be doing throughout the semester, and to my surprise, …show more content…
These feedbacks are given using a website service called Eli-Review; through this website, the professor can randomly assign your paper to a colleague for revision. Consequently, each student paper will be read by somewhat different classmates each time which will maximize the benefit to the writers. However, there are some students who are not used to letting others read their work -and I was one of them-, and this is due to the fact that we sometime write things that we do not want others to know about or because we are not confident about our work. As we do more reviews using this system, this idea become more acceptable by me because reviewers feedbacks help me enhance my work. Writing reviews was not an easy task as I thought; even though we have rubric of points we should address in our review, it is somehow hard to evaluate others work. I noticed that, sometime, I and other students focused on whether the reviewed paper has met the criteria in the rubric or not; however, some reviewers do write specific constructive feedback –special thanks to …show more content…
For this project, I was supposed to choose an object (artifact) from a culture that I am familiar with, and try to gradually explore this culture through that artifact. My choice was my electronic reader -the Amazon Kindle-; the problem I faced was that I did not know which culture I should associate this artifact with! I cannot correlate it to my culture in Saudi Arabia because reading -in general- is not an activity that we spend our free time with. After asking my professor about what I should do, she suggested that I either associate this device with the American culture or college students’ culture. I took with the professor advice and tried my somehow compare both Arabs and Americans reading habit as long as writing information about the usage of e-readers and what make them better than the traditional hardcover books. The problem was that, in the next project -the remix- we were required to continue our work with the cultural artifact you have chosen in the previous project, so I faced the same problem again. I ended up making a video about the e-reader along with mentioning anything about the culture I linked it to. I feel like I could have done better product if I have chosen a better artifact from the beginning; but anyway, this is a lesson I