Writing and Rhetoric, also known as ENGL 165, fulfilled my foundation course and the Cormier Honors College requirements. Writing and Rhetoric was one of the first Honors courses I took when I started my educational career at Longwood. This course focuses on preparing students for writing and research they will conduct during their university experience and will learn, explore, analyze, and inform within diverse academic context.
Before taking this course, I had mixed feeling about my writing abilities. I knew how to structure my writing to flow, but it was challenging to make sure the message I was writing made grammatical sense. During my time in this course, I completed activities where I free-wrote my initial thoughts and later checked to make sure it was grammatically correct. This approach helped me focus on one writing component at a time: the structure and flow of the writing piece first and then the grammar format. This course also enables me to understand that writing differs between academic contexts and how you have to shift the way you write based on the audience and context you are writing for. I felt unprepared when I started my educational career at Longwood, but I was thankful to take this course because it strengthens my writing abilities. I now applied the skills that I learned in this course to the other courses I had and will take at Longwood and beyond.
The artifact I chose to exhibit the work I have done in this course is my first empathy narrative assignment. This assignment challenges me to tackle a different writing style other than the traditional academic writing, and this assignment uses a blog or op-ed writing style. Before I started writing my narrative, I looked at different examples of a blog and op-ed writing styles, and these examples served as a model for how I wanted to tackle this essay. When thinking about my topic, I thought about a moment that impacted me, which is how I got into special education. After completing this assignment, I found it impactful and enjoyed writing in a different writing style. I have included the empathy narrative essay below: