Over the course of Wrt 102, I have to say this semester was one of the busiest semesters in terms of academics. Aside from all other tests, assignments, and reports steadily filling up my schedule day in and day out, much time was dedicated to learning what writing really is through this course of Writing 102. Prior to taking my first writing course in Writing 102 as a college student at Stony Brook, my understanding and appreciation of writing were nonexistent. I treated writing as only a type of academic assignment I had to complete for the sake of submitting the work. Yet as I am writing the final blog post of the semester at the endpoint of completion of the course (almost), it is this sort of mixed feeling of sad (that the course is at the very end) and happy (that I was able to learn much about what writing really is and what it means to me).

The course was divided into three major assignments: rhetoric, academic writing, research. The flow of the assignments, at least to me, felt like it started out as a personal, diary kind of writing in rhetoric to less personal, more reasoning based on evidence and sources in research. In rhetoric, I was able to reminisce back to the very beginning of life in the United States when I first encountered the English language as an immigrant. I had to think back to the very beginning of my English-language learning journey as a 11-year old. I also learned what a literacy sponsor was. This rhetoric assignment was the most meaningful because I was able to travel back in time and jot down my experiences and situations I was part of as a kid. The second assignment of academic writing was somewhat challenging and foreign because I have never had the experience of writing and explicitly stating each stage of the process of academic research. Because I was always fascinated with sleep and how my sleeping habit became poorer coming into college, I chose to write and research about sleep. Through this work, I was able to fully understand the process of research and the fundamentals behind it that would prepare me for the next and final assignment in researched argument assignment. To look for sources of the many irrelevant sources that would pop on library database was a struggle; I would find one crucial evidence out of the 10 sources which contained 9 other irrelevant sources. Yet, this was the process as a research writer and I only had to go through it. Overall, this course was filled with much learning, appreciation and discovery as a writer and as a person through many available opportunities in peer review, library session, in-class writing and conference meetings.