Before Taking Mat’s ENC 2135 class I felt as though when I would write essays I would usually just type up a bunch of words and it would all fall together and I would receive a decent grade. This class wasn’t really difficult but it did challenge me to write in a different context that I haven’t written in before. Project 1 was a personal Narrative and a meaningful encounter within a community. For this project, I immediately had the perfect story that happened in my past that would be not only interesting but correlate with the main focus of the assignment. I really liked this assignment because it wasn’t a typical writing assignment where a student is asked to write a paper on a topic that didn’t really have a personal connection with them. I feel as though Mat’s class made his students write about things that pertain to them and doing so makes their papers more interesting and motivating to write better papers. Project 1 didn’t even really feel like an assignment but more like just me telling my story. I didn’t really revise much until this semester and after the first conference with Mat he showed me how I could improve my writing and once I fixed those minor issues I felt like my paper was perfect. Project 2 was the most difficult project this semester mainly because there were multiple components to it and I have a procrastination problem and it was difficult for me to have everything organized properly. Like it took forever for me to set up the interview and in the annotated bibliography, I wanted to include the interview in it but I couldn’t really do that because I hadn’t conducted an interview yet. But I wasn’t really stressed about it because I knew that once I got out of the procrastinating mindset, everything would fall back in place. I had to go to the Reading Writing center to revise my project 2 essay because I was too focused on generalities. At the second Conference, Mat told me about this and I tried to fix it but then he emailed me and I received help from Jorge in the RWC and we went sentence by sentence and edited my paper together. One thing that always confused me in this class was when Mat would use the term “Genre” in a way that I never heard before. But as the semester went on and doing my own research on what genres are, I finally understand what he means. The Blogs that Mat had us do were a really cool way to keep us writing and engaged in the class. I’ll admit that there were some blogs that I didn’t do on time but I liked them because they weren’t graded strictly and I could basically write about whatever I wanted and that made me appreciate what I was writing more. I felt free while I would write them like I could express my personal viewpoint on whatever I was writing instead of writing based on trying to get the best grade that I can get. I feel like writing in this way makes someone’s writing more genuine and possibly makes students more motivated to write. I noticed sometimes with the blogs I would be writing and reach the word count requirement in a matter of minutes and feel like I have so much more to say. Project 3 was maybe the most Fun project this semester. I really liked it because I basically had free reign over what I wanted to do for my project. I like projects where students are encouraged to be creative and the whole course I was encouraged to be creative in a way. This semester I Put together Videos, designed a t-shirt made a flyer. Mat was probably my best teacher so far because he made college feel like how I thought it would be. Mat was a Genuine person from the beginning of class and I liked his way of explaining things to the class as though we’re not just students but we’re people just like him. I’m glad I took his ENC course this semester because I learned lessons that I can take with me further on in my college career and maybe even after.
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