Maddy Karlick
11.23.2014
Roberto Ascalon
Retrospective/Prospective Essay
September 24th 2014 marked the first day for me as a college student. Like any other first day of school, my nerves were on fire. Butterflies fluttered around my stomach from the moment I went to bed the night before until I was out of class at 12:50. The anticipation of knowing this would be the first day of a new chapter in my life was something I had never experienced before. College was something that I had always thought about my whole life but actually meeting the day that I was a college student was unbelievable and overwhelming. My second class of the day, English 101, was nerve wracking. Everyone looked so old compared to high school so I thought I might have been in the wrong room while 20 other unrecognizable faces looked at me as I walked in the room. Once class actually began, it was interesting to say the least. I had thought the days of ice breakers and awkward first days of learning everyone's names was over yet the first thing we did was play a game called common ground. In this game, you have to share something about yourself that no one would know by looking at you. It was a fun game and I got to know interesting things about my classmates' lives that I would not have expected. Over the course of ten weeks, I learned more and more about all of them and it was an experience I would not soon forget. I learned a lot of things in English 101 including new techniques for writing as well as new styles of writing. I grew not only as a person, but a writer as well.
Applying for Western, I had a preconceived notion that Western's students were different and more free-spirted than most college students. After my first day in English 101 and hearing the things that made others different during the common ground game made me realize just how unique the students that attend Western Washington University truly are. Some students were into things like Pokémon and martial arts, one student even had same sex parents which I never had encountered in my life. I realized how different and diverse the people are here compared to the people that I went to school with for twelve years. I quickly realized these people were nothing like the people I had grown up with in Mill Creek and it was going to take a lot of adjusting to get used to this huge change. Even though I had heard about the unique lives of only twenty of Western's thousands of students, I fell more in love with the school and realized I had made the right choice.
Essay one was my first essay as a college student. It seemed like my entire school system from K-12 had always followed the same outline of how to write an essay and I was nervous that my system of writing was not worthy enough for a college level class. The only style of writing I had ever known was deductive, so having to write an inductive essay seemed difficult because I had never even heard of it before. It was difficult to grasp the concept of asking questions that I did not know the answer to and having a definite answer in an essay. After my one on one meeting, I got a better understanding of how to write inductive essays. I learned it was okay to not know the answer to a question and to think out loud in your paper. It was a fun experience to put stuff in my paper that I was pondering but could not include in deductive essays because it wouldn't make sense. Inductive essays broke my rules about writing essays and made it fun to write a type of essay I had never encountered before.
While learning about inductive essays and how they worked, we were taught all the techniques used to write them. The technique of pan/track/zoom allowed me to write a better essay and make it of higher quality. This technique has three parts to it that help you to think of ideas and get them to flow in your essay. Part one of this technique is panning. One would begin by looking at the big idea of your essay and write about it in a general point of view. Talk about the idea as a whole. Part two is tracking, where you would track or transition into another idea about your topic. The third and final part of this strategy is zoom. Zooming is where you zoom in on the nitty-gritty details of your topic. Get specific and dive into your topic, then start the process all over again. This strategy helps by allowing you to look at all aspects of your topic. It allows the writing to zoom in on the details as well as look at the big picture and think about how this topic affects the world. In my first essay, I did not quite understand this concept that well but after learning more about it, I was able to incorporate it into my second essay and improve greatly from my first essay. I did not zoom out at the bigger picture of fan fiction in my first essay and instead focused on the small parts of it. I was able to better zoom out and look at the bigger picture of my idea, then pan to look at all of the other parts of my ideas on fan fiction. I was able to zoom out and look at the bigger picture than zoom in and look at all of the details to truly give a rounded look at my essay.
Creating a conversation between authors also helped improve my essays greatly. Quoting different authors in my essay allowed me to bring in different opinions and ideas in my essay as well as allow me to comment on these quotes and show how my ideas parallel the suthors I was quoting. Reading these authors papers also gave me the ideas that I wrote about in my paper. Shaffner's ideas of fan fiction and how beneficial it is helped shaped my essay. Jenkin also brought in good ideas about why the fan writers these stories. Creating a conversation between these authors as well as Gee, Pratt, and Yancey, I was able to get ideas across and elaborate on those to show my ideas as well. This also allowed me to use their words to express ideas that I could not fully express.
Framing was another technique that helped me a lot in writing my essays. Framing was a strategy where you essentially would create two boxes in your mind, one inside of the other, and you would have to decide if you were going to frame affinity space around your idea or frame your idea around affinity space. I struggled with essay two in the beginning because I did not understand how to balance writing about affinity spaces and my topic of fan fiction. This technique was more of a way to think rather than a way to write. After learning more about framing it became easier to write. It was a hard concept to grasp at first but helped me a lot in writing my essay. I was able to frame my topic around affinity spaces. I took the ideas that Gee wrote about when he listed all of the necessary components of fan fiction and explained how fan fiction represented those components. It was easier to form ideas and write my essay when I thought about my topic in that way. My ideas flowed easier using this technique and writing my second essay instantly became much easier.
We also learned other techniques such as the authoritative "I" and the iceberg. I used these techniques without really being conscious of their use. The authoritative "I" is your voice in an essay and the use of it throughout your writing. In my essays, I always make sure my voice is in the essay because it is what makes your essay unique and different from everyone else's writing. The iceberg was a technique of creating a deeper analysis in my essays and creating more questions and ideas. The iceberg started with a question than used that question to ask more questions to create new ideas and keep the writing flowing. In this technique, you started at the top of the iceberg and as you deepened analysis, you went deeper into the iceberg. It helped me in having a mental picture of how to deepen analysis and make my writing have more depth.
English 101, in my experience, focused more on how to improve on writing rather than reading. I did not learn any new reading skills but through reading the assigned articles and essays, I learned new ideas and was given more insight to things such as fan fiction, affinity spaces, and contact zones. Before this class, I didn't know really anything about fan fiction or the community that revolves around it. After better informing myself about it and writing two essays on it, I learned a lot about everything related to fan fiction: why people write it, why people join, why people stay, and why people enjoy it. I had also never heard about affinity spaces before reading James Paul Gee's article on it. He created the idea that a community is a space, not a place. For a community to count as a space they have to entail all of these portals and generators and content and they have to be free to join and open to all. I thought his ideas were interesting and I had never thought of communities in that way. It gave me new insight and new knowledge on the world.
For essay one, we had no choice but to write about fan fiction. But in essay two we were given the option to write about a new topic or continue with the topic of fan fiction and just do a re-write. Most classmates decided to choose a new topic that was interesting to them but I had difficulty in thinking of a new topic so I stuck with the idea of fan fiction. At first I thought it would be easy because I could just change up my first essay and that would become my second. But I quickly realized I would have to start from scratch and write a completely new essay. I struggled at first but once I started incorporating the ideas of Gee's affinity spaces and framing, the ideas began flowing and I had no idea where to stop. Once I had to begin writing my presentation essay, it was just like writing my second essay but instead I was writing about contact zones and Yancey's ideas of education. These topics were not as easy to frame around fan fiction but became easily once I re read their essays with the idea of fan fiction in my head. I used various techniques such as panning and zooming to get a well-rounded view to my essay and show all the necessary points and ideas. My presentation essay was not too difficult to write because I had had practice re writing an essay to incorporate new ideas with essay two.
When I first began writing this Retrospective/Prospective essay, I did not think I had much to write about because I did not think I had learned that much in English 101. All I did was write a couple essays and read a couple of articles by writers I had never ever heard of. But after going through my work and my writings, I realized I learned a lot more than I had thought. The techniques that I learned in class helped me a lot in creating ideas and putting them into my essays. There were times when I would be writing my essay and I was thinking faster than I could type. New ideas were popping into my brains as I was writing and I felt like my essays would never end. I didn't know how or where to end my essays either because my ideas just kept flowing. As I was writing about one idea, I would think of another one and another one and so on. English 101 helped me a lot in improving my writing skills and I learned a lot from the readings we did. It opened my eyes to new ideas of Gee, Shanfer, Jenkins, and Greene. These techniques will definitely help me in writing future essays throughout my next couple years in college and improved my writing from what I had learned in high school. I now understand why English 101 is a required class at Western because it teaches you the basics to writing a quality essay which is necessary in college.