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Phillip Hunter
Professor Meaghan Rand
UWRT 1103
3 December 2014
Final Reflection
A song that represents my experience in this class is I Believe I Can Fly, by R.
Kelly. The chorus of this song conveys a message that one can fly to achieve goals.
The title of this course itself is Writing and Inquiry in Academic Contexts. This sets the
tone of the course to be a somewhat goal driven class. The lyrics I believe I can soar, I
see me running through that open door are directly symbolic of walking through the
door of academics into a professional career. If I were an instructor of this class, the
topics I would focus on are literacy, inquiry, and above all, reflection. At this stage in
students academic careers, the focus should be put less on creating and analyzing
writings, such as mindlessly reading Shakespeares work, to reflecting on the
knowledge that we have obtained throughout our education. While education is
something that never truly ends, it must change and evolve as our time progresses.
Reflection of skills in this class allows for a focus on specific fields useful to students
throughout their college career. Focuses on genre activities reinforce these skills by
providing more specific choices to use throughout college and a professional career.
While students should still be well-rounded to gain a successful education, the optimal
specific genres learned in this class are still necessary to excel in both general
education and major specific courses. My favorite learning resource within this class
was viewing the Truman Show. The Truman Show contained elements that both literally

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and metaphorically referenced many of the topics that we learned within this course.
From introducing inquiry to showing media influence, while even factoring in
socioeconomic relations, the Truman Show was a source that is also highly engaging to
students. The problem with many English or writing courses is the abundance of
required readings. Courses based on these assignments are a turn off to many
students from wanting to actually absorb the course material. Required readings,
especially for a somewhat open ended course such as this, should be used sparsely to
convey a specific message.
My successes within this class are mainly based around an evolution in thought
process. The concept of defamiliarization is common within this class, causing me to
inquire more about both writing skills and my world. Writing is a skill that can be utilized
as a form of expression of the mind. If we can keep an open mind while writing, the
quality and relatability of literary work can drastically improve. If I could change aspects
of my writing within this class, I would manage my time better with major assignments.
Due to time constraints, many of my writings have been more underdeveloped than they
could have been. With improved time management skills, my ideas would be more
developed and persuasive.
Rhetoric comes into play often during writing, even in a variety of genres and
contexts. Within my inquiry paper, rhetoric was required for conveying the desired
message. In the inquiry paper, I had to utilize various methods of rhetoric to show the
audience the types of technology that they had not realized impacted their lives. This
allowed for readers to be more knowledgeable about the world around them, even tying

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into the literacy phase of this course. Overall, the successes in this class are related to
both my thoughts as a writer and taking the thoughts of my readers into consideration.
The story of UWRT 1103 begins with a name change from ENGL 1103. With a
course prefix of English, there is an inherent focus on reading literature. This,
however, is not the purpose of this university writing class. Simply reading the course
title made me excited to take this course, as I knew that it would have more of a writing
focus than reading archaic, unrelatable, and forgettable literature. The courses first
objective involves instructing students on the meaning and importance of literacy. We
received a foreshadowing of our first project within the first weeks, as we participated in
a Sprangorland activity to examine language. It was here that I first realized the
connection between this course and my anthropology course. We used the same lesson
basics relating to literacy and identity as well as utilizing the famous Nacirema tale. We
then moved to analyze assumptions and study genres, learning that things do not have
to have a definite genre. It was around this time that we transitioned into focusing on
encoding and types of rhetoric and arguments, which would lead the course of the rest
of the semester. It was then that we strengthened our ability to both ask and answer
questions. Around this time, ethnography was a topic of discussion within class.
Ethnography is interestingly a word directly originating in the field of anthropology. This
was another way that these courses interestingly blended together. Then we moved
into inquiry, the topic that would be the focus for the better part of the rest of the
semester. Inquiry requires utilizing the core definitions that revolve around the course:
metacognition, defamiliarization, intertextuality, and problematization. It is at this point
that we viewed The Truman Show, which tied all of these aspects into a fantastic

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expression. This is also the point where I learned about the existence of the concept
map. This graphical brainstorming system helped vividly show the connections between
sources I chose to prove my inquiry argument. I then delved into the differences
between a research paper and an inquiry paper, and the pros and cons of each. Then,
we expressed our inquiry work in the form of multiple genres, allowing access to a
greater, more well rounded audience through multiple, but specific types of technology.
The time came for one of the most important portions of the course: reflection.
Reflection on our work, the school, and this course allows us to reinforce the skills that
we learned throughout the semester. This compilation of the events of the semester is
one of the best ways to review and remember the material learned in UWRT 1103. An
allegory of this college would relate the assignments done throughout college to reality.
Even though, except for some exceptions, class assignments will not drastically change
the world, college assignments prepare one for life in the world of reality. This is the true
meaning of being handed a college degree; a person is being symbolically having the
real world revealed to them after their education. Throughout education, students may
learn to do math problems, take a test and throw them away. They may learn to write
essays that will never be seen by anyone other than an instructor. They learn a foreign
language that will most likely be quickly forgotten. However, the combination of the
things learned throughout a learning experience gives a person an ability to
subconsciously access what they've learned to propel themselves throughout life.