Charles Thurston

UWRT 1102-027

Final Reflection Letter

Throughout this course there have been many different types of assignments. These
assignments have included both individual work. Throughout the semester I have been
developing my writing skills through my work in the course. I have engaged the work of the
course in different ways as I have progressed through the semester. The type of work has
strongly effected the way I have engaged the work.
About half of the workload of the course came in the form of individual assignments.
There was a constant flow of small individual assignments throughout the semester. These
small assignments were usually assigned as homework but were occasionally class work. I
approached these assignments with full effort at the beginning. As the small assignments
continued coming I began putting less effort into them and began focusing more on the larger
assignments. At the beginning of the semester all of the main assignments were individual
work. I focused on these more than the small assignments.
The other half of the workload for this course was group work. I placed a higher
importance on these assignments. Group assignments are a collaborative work that requires all
group members to participate. The responsibility that I felt to my group motivated me to work
harder on my assignments and make sure they were done on time. I did not want my group to
have to deal with the consequences of me failing to do my work properly. Working with a
group was much better than most of the individual assignments however the project that I liked
the most was one of the individual assignments.
The assignment that I favored over all of the rest was the Individual Inquiry Project, or
the IIP as we referred to it in the course. The main reason I liked this assignment was the
freedom of choice of subject matter. This project allowed me to work on a topic that I was
personally interested in. I ended up doing this project on a proposed ban on smoking that was
a news event at the time. I was interested in this topic because it is a controversial issue and
since I am a smoker it is something that could have potentially affected me personally. I
enjoyed researching this topic because it helped me learn some facts that relate to some of the
things that I do personally. It also allowed me to keep informed on the results of the proposed
ban without having to go out of my way to do so.
Even though I had no personal interest in most of the assignments I was able to develop
my writing skills throughout the course. I learned about how to better my writing and how to
use different genres of writing. This course introduced me to many new genres of writing that I
had never worked with before. I also learned how to effectively use genres to convey

information to specific target audiences. Throughout the course I have developed my writing
and learned new writing skills even though the material of the course was not particularly
entertaining to me.