This was the first-year English class I need to take and I took it in the Spring 2019 semester. The theme of the class was interesting because it focused on writings and how we can write about the topic of mass incarceration because that is what my professor Dr. Goldberg specialized in. I didn’t really think that this class that was supposed to help me improve my writing could be focused on a certain topic, but I was proven wrong. This class helped me to improve how I argue in a paper with agreeing, disagreeing, or doing both. It also helped me learn more about how to transition between paragraphs and write good introductions and conclusions. The books for the course that were our textbooks were They Say/I Say and The Everyday Writer, which were what really helped me with all that I have been talking about so far. The book we read that related to the topic was The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, and it had some good illustrations of some of the new writing techniques I learned in the class as well as helping me to learn more about mass incarceration. This book, other articles from the class, and the film 13th all helped me to see how there is still injustice for minorities but it is in the shadows of mass incarceration now.
Another thing we did in this class was to learn how to research for a specific topic that you have to write a paper on in class. We actually did have to write a paper like this, but this was also just to help us in the future. The librarian, Jennifer Beach, helped us to understand how to search the library databases for the right thing whether we were on campus or not. She was very helpful in doing this. The project we had to do for this class was to research a topic connected to mass incarceration and try to come up with an alternative to what is being done today. The topic I chose related to mass incarceration was mental health, which was narrowed down to depression after the articles I had researched on the library database seemed to be most connected to that. With my topic narrowed down, I looked for more articles that fit better and I looked for secondary sources too that would help me. I found these things and then I wrote my paper about alternatives to how depression is being treated with youth in mass incarceration. I would not have been able to do this paper as well as I did without learning how to research well and more about mass incarceration in general. This class helped me with both of those things and just becoming a better writer in general.
The artifact I have here is the research paper I mention in the above paragraph. It was one of the final things I had to do for the class and it shows how I have improved as a writer. Of course, there can always be improvement in my writing in college, so I will continue to improve my writing over time.