What Did I Learn?

 1- What Analysis is/is not:

Before this lesson, when I thought about analysis I just thought it was something like; summing up whatever I just looked at or read. When we dove further into figuring out what analysis is or isn’t, I then learned that it has a deeper meaning than just summarizing. When you’re analyzing something you want to suspend your judgement and start with questions first, not just answers. Analyzing something isn’t just looking at the surface of whatever it is you’re analyzing. You want to look for a deeper meaning. When we were told to analyze the New Yorker covers, having learned more about how to analyze and what it is, really helped a lot. 

2- Evolving Your Thesis Further:

Unit 2, we’ve been assigned the Artifact essay and we have to now evolve our thesis more. At first, when we were told to further evolve our thesis I was like, “What?”. I had no idea what else I could write about my thesis for this essay. But as we continued to talk about how to evolve a thesis and how to make it sound ten times better, I learned that it’s not just coming up with a topic for an essay and just writing it down. It’s more like you have to make sure you have some sort of reasoning that can back your thesis statement up (obviously) but then you have to find more evidence that’s like a “So what?” to eventually further your thesis. It’s easy to do now that I’ve learned about something like this and I actually thought that assignment wasn’t that important. 

3- How To Cite: MLA

I guess this wasn’t really an actual lesson so to say. But, with the amount of writing assignments we’ve had to do that has evidence included into you, you have to know how to cite with the MLA format. For some reason learning how to cite is actually so confusing for some reason. But, honestly because we had to do so many essays and assignments that had to have citations included in them, I think now I actually know how to cite. Knowing this before college is definitely a million times easier because I know professors are expecting us to know how to do it. 

4- What Does It Mean To Argue Responsibly?:

This lesson was in Unit 3 when we had to complete an argumentative essay. During it we still had to learn how to actually argue a good argument (if that makes sense). There’s more to an argument than just stating your opinion on a specific topic. I learned that arguments are also not screaming matches, they can be calm and collected. During an argument, you have to have an open mindset and allow others to state their own opinions and maybe allow them to change your mind if that’s fitting. You want to know about the topic enough to have an educated argument rather than just spitting out random things that don’t necessarily make sense. Learning about what an argument actually is and how to argue responsibly helped with my essay in the end and allowed me to realize that next time I actually get in an argument it doesn’t have to be a yelling match.

5- The last thing I learned throughout this whole course is not necessarily an actual lesson but I enjoyed being able to basically write however we wanted and whatever we wanted with some limitations of course. I learned that it’s mostly beneficial to write about something that you know about whether it be a topic you’re interested in or from an article you’ve analyzed. Knowing a lot about a topic helps a lot with your writing.