Course Analysis Essay: English 1010
My first semester of college has been an exciting experience. Up to this point, I wasn’t concerned with having good communication but instead was more focused on just meeting a word count. So, when I first walked into my English 1010 class, I had no idea what to expect. Was it going to be easy? Hard? Was it going to be just another generic English class similar to the kind I had been taking my whole life? These things that had been running through my mind quickly vanished; this class was different.
One of the first things that Professor Evans engrained in our heads was to be concise with our work. Every day he would preach the importance of five main ideas for writing, referred to as the five C’s: Communication, Caring, Correctness, Concision, and Creativity. He had said these rules so many times I almost started getting sick of hearing them, but I had no idea just how much they would help me improve as a writer. The first time we got to put these C’s to use was a one-page summary of “Singer Solution to World Poverty” and “When Ignorance is Bliss.” I was relieved at first to hear the paper only had to be one page, but as I started writing, I quickly realized I was approaching the limit and hadn’t nearly covered everything necessary. Professor Evans had created the perfect way to hone our concision skills by challenging us to fit two articles’ worth of information into only one page.
Professor Evans taught us that writing is communication, and to communicate effectively, you need to do more than transmit your information. You need to listen. Being able to absorb what you are writing about is just as important as putting words on paper. To practice this, we were assigned a rhetorical analysis of a book called, So You Want to Talk About Race. The goal was to write a letter to an administrator at another school, urging them to implement a program like UTC’s Read to Achieve plan and what should be changed. Like all our papers, this was done in segments. Every time we finished a draft, we would upload them, and our peers would provide feedback on how we could improve. Countless times I would be stuck or unsatisfied with my paper until I reviewed peer papers and received tips from classmates that significantly enhanced my draft. For example, I was struggling with document format formatting, and it wasn’t until I went over my classmates’ work and received tips that I was able to solve my problems.
Our final major project would be a synthesis paper over the topics we had discussed in class over the semester. The objective was to use the skills we had learned, absorbing information, and using the five Cs to overview the topics by giving four perspectives. I was ready for this; I had learned to effectively project my thoughts into paper form and felt like a completely new writer. I turned my paper in and received revision advice from my professor, and I am currently rewriting it to make a better score.
English 1010 has been an essential class for me as a writer. It has transformed my view of writing from just meeting a word count to communicating my ideas. It’s almost like creating art, starting with a rough sketch, and then putting in the base colors and refining touches via reviews from my classmates. Writing is a process of learning, creating, and refining an idea into something people would want to read. The five Cs engraved into my mind will be used in future writing classes, and I have learned to listen to my material before writing on it. Thank you, English 1010, for making me a better writer than I thought I would ever be.
