I found this class to be very helpful for many different reason. I feel that it has strengthened my writing and analytic abilities, as well as my understanding of my career field. Projects that started out as just normal, and sometimes dull class assignments soon began to gain my interest as they helped me learn more about audience and discourse communities and my own major. This is one of the first classes I have had where all the projects eventually tie together and the things I learn in doing them actually are useful in my career knowledge. Doing projects like the annotated bibliography and literature review have caused me to do a lot of further thinking and learning about my major that I would not have looked into otherwise. I think my overall literacy over this course has improved; I have gained a lot of new knowledge about research, comprehensions, discourse communities, and genre. 

In this class I think some of the most important aspects were the peer reviews and revisions. With the peer reviews I found it very helpful to get the input of someone else who is at the same level I am at in this class. It just seems easier to understand what can be improved when it comes from other students working on the same thing. It also helped us learn more about subjects outside our exact interests. For example, I found the project about virtual patients to be very interesting and informative, but I never would have looked up that information if it was not presented to me in this class. It was also great to be able to have the opportunity to revise our papers so much along the way, especially as we gained more knowledge from our peers about what to improve on. I feel like I did not take advantage of this as much as I could have. I would often only revise as minimal an amount as possible and never went the extra mile to improve my papers after getting my grades back.

The readings we did in class helped significantly as well, especially with comprehension. The articles were often interesting, and there was more motivation to read them since they were actually relevant and helpful. They were just hard enough to make me have to read them more than once, which was probably good for my overall understanding. And as far as writing in this class goes, I think it was handled very well. All the projects interrelated  instead of them all being completely separate of one another. I think this motivated me more and created more interest, especially as the projects became more focused on our interests  Another thing that was nice about this class is that the writing was not overly focused on grammar and structural information. I am used to peer reviews just involving grammatical corrections, but in this class they actually involve more analysis of content.

The research in this class was great as well. Learning how to use the UCF database was very beneficial to a lot of my work, and I ended up using that for the majority of my annotated bibliography. And I have never been so interested in a research topic as I was with the research in this class. I was actually looking to gain the information for my own knowledge and wanted to find out all I could, rather than just trying to complete a grade for the class. I found all the articles for my annotated bibliography very interesting  even though it was difficult to find many on the subject of graphic design. I never even knew about the research gap I found about a lack in terminology in graphic design until I did research in this class. 

On my final project my original plan was to interview three or four graphic designers that I personally know to ask them about the research gap I found, but none of them got back to me. So instead I decided to address areas in need of titles and attempt to come up with a few myself.



How each project went:

Literacy Narrative

The literacy narrative focused on helping us understand what and who influenced our own literacy. It was good being able to think back to what influenced me the most to get me to the point I am at today and what influences the literacy of others. This was also the first project where we had peer reviews and these were very helpful to me in the class.



Genre Analysis

The genre analysis was meant to help us understand genre and how it is used in our own areas of interest. For this project I was able to start learning more about my major, what discussions are taking place, and how people in it communicate to each other. We also learned how to research scholarly articles during this project and the information helped through all the following projects. 



Annotated Bibliography

The annotated bibliography I felt was one of the best projects this semester. It really helped me to better understand multiple things in my field as well as about literacy. Some of these things that I was able to expand my knowledge of were about audience, conversations in the community, and further information on genre. During this assignment I feel I learned the most about graphic design, and I realized that there were certain discussions happening in the field that were important to be aware of. As far as my literacy goes, this assignment really helped my abilities to analyse and summarize vast amounts of complicated information.



Literature Review

The literature review aloud us to form an opinion on a common discussion we discovered while doing our annotated bibliographies. We found gaps within research in the fields based on subjects or issues not many people in the field were addressing. It was interesting to try to contribute our own knowledge and opinions to these discussions since we have been learning so much over the semester about our areas of study. It also was a great assignment to help me work on synthesizing information from differing sources and applying it to one conversation taking place. 



This class was a great transition class for getting used to college level writing. Even though much of this was new to me, I am sure I will have to apply all the information I learned to future classes. The research methods I learned in this class were especially helpful, and enjoyable as well. So I feel like if I keep going about future research the way I did in this class, I will probably be successful in future classes.



I think in this portfolio I have earned a B. There were some projects, like journals, where I did not try my hardest on and was just doing it to get the grade. Others though I did take very seriously, especially my annotated bibliography and lit review. I went through many articles every day trying to find good ones to use for the annotated bib. I also looked up most if not all of the authors to the articles I chose to make sure they were credible. I took these projects very seriously, probably because they interested me so much. I took most of my peer reviews seriously and made an effort to make any changes that were suggested. I do think I could have done a bit more with revisions though. I usually only revised once and still only did the minimum. I also know I have run into quite  few surface errors.