Now that the semester has drawn to a close, I have come to look back upon the work that I have done in my writing class. I would say that I have become better as a writer, which is evident in my grades, and that means I am making progress. Writing isn’t and probably will never be one of my favorite things, but I know that it is a necessity. It is an important foundation that will greatly help my business skills, which will in turn help my design work get marketed. As much work and as time consuming as this class can be, I see it as a way to help me become the artist and designer that I want to become.

I learned a lot from the large paper assignments. The Research paper was a pain to write, because the process was such an undertaking, given the time it required to complete it by the deadlines. I’m the type of person who actually enjoys doing the research, because I am learning about all kinds of different information, but compiling all of it together in one big paper takes a lot of effort. The final version came out quite nicely, I would say, however, and it was well worth the while. Writing about the cultural aspects of Australia was a fun area to explore.

The Revision paper was a considerably more fun to write, because I had much more creative room while writing it. I’ve never really done any fictional writing before, so this was some new ground that I was exploring. I guess what I liked about it was the fact that I was able to create my own characters and then decide what happens to them in plot, as well as deciding how they respond to the circumstances. What I didn’t know is that the characters start to write themselves after a while, though. Once you’ve created a character, they end up taking a life of their own. The Revision paper was probably my favorite one to write because it didn’t feel like it was too much of an assignment; rather I was coming up with something much like I do in other artwork.

I enjoyed the process for the movie paper probably the best, because it entailed actually watching a movie and then writing about it. In some ways, this was a lot like the research paper, as it also included looking for reviews for the movie. I mentioned above that I enjoyed the actual research for the Research paper, which probably had some impact on my attitude toward this paper. I even found the on-location note taking fun to do. This was definitely an observation piece, which was different from the other two.

I’m glad that each of these writing projects took a different direction. In this way, the writing didn’t become too redundant. Each one of them explored a different process and the result was a dramatically different tone than the previous one.

Like much of the writing that I’ve done in this class, I didn’t necessarily find it hard. It was just a matter of actually doing the writing. Homework projects were usually pretty interesting, especially those that included writing responses to the readings. In-class writings were fast-paced and usually pretty random. I never knew what to expect for these writings, which I think was the point. Since the start of this class, I know that I have made a lot of progress here. The main lesson that was learned here was to get comfortable writing something, even if that something is first-draft material. The idea is to get something down so that you have something to work with.

For the website, I have chosen my favorite writings from this class. The ones that I chose were either the ones that turned out the best or the ones that explored the ideas that I thought were most interesting. My choice for the in-class writing was made because it was the most completed and worked best on its own. I wish I had more time to work on the website, there was a lot more that I wanted to do with it, especially when it comes to the design.

My advice to incoming students would be that you just do the homework when you get it, seriously. Don't procrastinate, because rushing in the end is not fun at all. Procrastination, true to its character, never pays off.