Phase 4: Journey Through My Linguistic Mind

This ENG 110 class taught by Sherry Hamlet has so far been one of my favorite classes this semester. This is my first year of undergrad, so I was very nervous and caught in such perfectionist tendencies, but the readings done in this class has provided so much insight. Firstly, I never knew what an English dialect was. I thought most people spoke English but spoke it differently due to being from different races and cultures. I didn’t know there were events in the world where people were being unfairly treated due to their English dialect. As someone who has worked in customer service for years, this bothers me personally. Another meaningful insight I had was reading an article about Black English. I remember cringing so much initially reading it because there were so many (what I called at the time) “mistakes.” Having been taught Standard English my entire life I figured it was the ONLY way English was to be written if it couldn’t be spoken as well.

This journey through ENG 110 has helped me achieve all the learning course objectives which were far from my own which was simply to pass the class. One of the first objectives I learned was to explore and analyze a variety of genres and rhetorical situations. Learning to annotate also gave me patience to take my time when reading text and highlighting what I think is important to come back to if I need to summarize. I’ve even taken the skill of annotating and applied it to my other courses. It’s been most helpful in my Philosophy class since I have text to read every day essentially. Annotating allows me to feel engaged with what I’m reading and marking new vocabulary words for myself to look into and expand my knowledge even further. Even learning to analyze speech texts in class, hearing spoken word pieces has me listening closely to some lyrics of my favorite songs and looking for rhetorical situations in there as well.

Learning to recognize the role of language attitudes and standards was another course objective I’ve learned. One of my favorite pieces of this course was Jamila Lysicott’s “3 Ways to Speak English.” I love how she empowered the use of her trilingual skills in speaking Standard English, Black English and Patois. As someone who is also pretty fluent in these 3 tongues and a lover of poetry, I felt very related and empowered by Lysicott’s poem. I have also learned to develop strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising and editing all semester long. I’ve been reading many different texts, writing up multiple drafts before turning in my final assignments, collaborating with my classmates during peer reviews, and consistently revising and editing with the feedback from those reviews. I learned to recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing practices primarily in Phase 2 having to dissect Lysicott’s poem line by line to understand all the rhetorical strategies at work in her piece.

Peer reviews helped accomplish the course objective of engaging in collaborative and social aspects of writing processes. At first it was a little daunting receiving feedback from my peers because not all were really engaged or had work to present. But in some cases, it was the opposite. Some of my peers offered me such helpful feedback on homing in on my thesis statements and making sure my paragraph essays flow Into one another. Before the semester ends, I’d like to get more active with the goal of understanding and using print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences. I have wrote and published my own book in the past so I’m not new to using print, but I’d like to learn more about navigating my CUNY portfolio and having my work uploaded to reach the CUNY audience at least. Locating research sources in the library’s databases/archives and on the internet and evaluating them for credibility, accuracy, timeliness and bias was a key point pf Phase 3 with the Research Essay. I wasn’t even aware of google.scholar.com before Phase 3 so it was very interesting wandering around on that site and seeing what it had to offer me for my essay. Even looking for information from sites I read from daily such as The HuffPost and Medium was very engaging. It taught me to bring my daily life into my work.

Composing texts that integrate my stance with appropriate sources using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis and argumentation was probably my favorite course learning objective. I’m someone who loves to write poetry, but I often struggle with finding inspiration or a direction to go in but being exposed to many vulnerable spoken pieces in this class such as “Niggaz” by Julian Curry showed me there’s no shame to be had in taking a vulnerable and emotional stand in your work. I learned that there’s nothing wrong with providing argumentation against the beliefs of others when writing my Researched Essay on who should be allowed to say the N word. Then finally, practicing systematic application of citation conventions was probably my least favorite to be honest. I didn’t know how to cite before coming to college and even failed my first philosophy paper due to incorrect citations so now I deal with trauma concerning that LOL. But learning to cite in this class helped me to write a better second philosophy paper that didn’t get critiqued on citation, so I feel that’s a major improvement.

In conclusion, I’m really grateful for having taken this class. I’m grateful to my professor Sherry Hamlet for being so passionate in her desire to teach and just always rolling with the punches when it came to class. I appreciate her for seeing something in my work because that’s what really pushed me to take back up the pen and start writing poetry again. I appreciate the prompts she comes up with in class because the day we received the passion prompt, I’m not sure what came over me. My pen was in hand and my brain just started churning out words and I just began to write, same as I did with this essay actually. Maybe there’s a linguistic genius living dormant inside me waiting to be inspired or pushed further. I’ll see because as professor Hamlet says, “You never know where you’re writing will take you.”

Works Cited:

Media

N/A, Violet. “Pin by Megpoid Sugar on Пламенная Бригада Пожарных ♥️: Anime Icons, Shinra Kusakabe, Anime.” Pinterest, n.d., www.pinterest.com/pin/683843524660489100/.