Ian Fuqua

UWRT 1103
Mrs. Thomas
26 Apr. 2016
Final Reflection
1. Choose a song or musical composition that communicates your experience with
writing and UWRT 1102. Consider including a video of the song. Explain your choice.
The song I would choose is Nocturnal Rainbows by Hopsin. This song perfectly conveys
my entire UWRT experience and the SLOs I learned that gave me new strategies for
interpretation and self-expression. The lyrics directly exemplify how to use critical thinking
when looking at important subjects. In this song Hopsin expresses how the perspectives and
artwork of individuals has become unoriginal and that people need to step outside the box. He
also uses a ton of self-reflection on his music and peoples opinions of his music. He uses
excellent lyricism and wording to convey his perspective on popular topics such as current rap
music, God, Obama, the Illuminati and his overall perspective on life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPHHudm0NTY

2. If you were to teach this class, what ideas would you emphasis?
If I were to teach UWRT 1103 I would emphasis the importance of critical reading. This is
because it is very important to go beyond simply reading and understanding the main idea of a
text. To get the most out of it you must completely evaluate it and identify its strengths and

weaknesses and then contrast it with your own thoughts and ideas. This allows you to have a
deeper more meaningful connection to what you are reading and helps you grow as a writer and
improves your analyzing skills. Another thing I would emphasize is creativity and thinking
outside the box. It is crucial to have the ability to form your own non bias views on different
topics and also just as important to feel comfortable freely expressing yourself.

3. Explain how your understanding of rhetorical knowledge has changed over the
course of the semester using at least three examples from your writing. Ex. Did you shift
an assignment to better fit a particular genre like a proposal?
My understanding of rhetorical knowledge has grown a lot throughout this semester. When
writing my thesis I tried to put a deeper purpose behind my analysis of free will. This purpose
was to try and widen my peers viewpoints on how they might make decisions and feel
responsible for doing so. I knew how abstract the concept was and how hard conveying some
aspects would be so I knew it needed to have a philosophical/scientific genre. When writing my
literacy narrative I knew that a part of my audience would be other students so I tried to make
some parts relatable that way it would be more interesting and capture their attention so that they
could connect to my writing more.

4. Explain how your critical reading has improved during the semester. Ex. In what
ways did you read across texts for connections and patterns in your inquiry?
Researching Free Will imposed a lot of critical reading on me due to the complexity of the
subject and how deeply I had to think about the topic. When looking at a bunch of different

perspectives and trying to include them all in an ongoing conversation in your writing it is very
important to have critically read their work that way you can have the best understanding and
connection to their ideas.

5. Discuss your composing processes. Ex. Did you conduct additional research
while revising or after consulting a colleague? Provide at least three examples to support
your assertion.
My composing process was largely influenced by the peer review sessions held in class. I
found that advice from peers helped me touch up my work a lot. Research also played a big role
in my composing process because gathering information and perspectives from different sources
helped me expand my writing a lot. Even something as simple as looking up synonyms for
keywords in my work helped me more accurately convey my ideas. Finally, the book They Say, I
Say was extremely helpful with the strategies I used to develop my thesis. It showed the
importance of including different voices in your writing while trying to convey a message. It also
provided a lot of useful examples for how to create the most impactful discussion within my
writing for my audience.
6. Provide at least three examples of your knowledge of conventions Ex. sentence
level changes, MLA citations.
Knowledge of conventions helped me with everything from how to properly cite my sources
in my thesis (alphabetically with a hanging indent) to where to put a commas in my writing.
Thanks to my knowledge of conventions, I now know to put the title of a book in italics and the
title of an article in quotations.

7. Critical Reflection: A) Explain the importance of reflection in learning

processes. B) Explain what you think is important in providing commentary on others
work and receiving commentary on your own. C) Provide at least three examples of your
nuanced use of commentary in your writing projects.
A) Reflection is key to looking back at what you have done and deciding how to
improve your work or find what worked well so that you can use that strategy again.
Without this type of consideration your work is limited to how much it can improve. B)
Commentary is what allows us to get the opinions of others and apply them to our
writing. This includes things the readers liked or didnt like and things the readers
understood or didnt understand. Because of the fact that we write to convey ideas and
emotions it is very important to receive some form of feedback on our work so that we
can know what works and doesnt work. I enjoyed giving feedback and advice to my
peers that way they could take my constructive criticism and use it however they want. I
think commentary helped us encourage each other to improve our writing skills and also
present our thoughts with confidence. C) Ex1: One example of when I used commentary
I received was in my thesis paper when Shafer read it and commented to explain some of
the more complicated words that might be new to people. I elaborated on a bunch of the
keywords like predestination and determinism and it helped my paper become more
comprehensible. Ex2: Another helpful bit of commentary I received was from Brandon
who read my thesis on free will and recommended I provide more everyday examples in
the paper so that it can become more easily relatable and meaningful to the audience.
With this advice in mind I added examples to a few aspects of my paper like when I
explained the.impact of the idea of free will on me when I wake up and decide if I should
go to class or not. Ex3: Another helpful example of commentary was when i read my

literacy narrative at the peer review session and someone recommended that I change the
way I word some of my sentences to sound less indecisive. Like saying that something
molded me as a person rather than saying it may have.