NOTE: my translations are shown in their respective pages instead of here.

Final Reflection Essay

   Through this semester, I had the opportunity to improve my writing method and values. My past experiences with English have led me to find it hard to more personalize how I write while also having a paper I was proud of. From my evaluation of the work and learning I’ve done, I can make 4 claims about what I’ve learned below.

I learned that non-standard English should be used not in spite of the conflict with standard English but because of it. I heard this idea from “Why I keep speaking up, even when people mock my accent”  (Saleem) and “Should Writers Use they Own English” (Young).

I applied this in my LLN. I tried to write like how I’d speak. I tend to go into tangents purely to lighten what I’m talking about, and so I included that. For example, “so I’d strategically switch tabs to the still-in-session class about chlorophyll or whatever the teachers were talking about at the time before she entered the living room.” I always understood that standards for English were constructs, but I still remember feeling hurt when my writing style got critiqued for being unusual when I was younger on parts that I thought would be fine with better grammar. But the idea that they should be challenged even if they take decades to change, because they have to be challenged, gives some peace.

But to be able to more successfully integrate your style, you can use good revision to be able to write more freely earlier in the process, and while I unintentionally applied this idea before, I recognized it thanks to Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” covered later in the semester.

I wrote my LLN’s first draft in around an hour, and thought it wasn’t very good or even aligned with the ideas I only touched on in the end after I had written the whole draft. But after getting feedback, I could make an LLN that was less unfocused and end with something I liked. For example, in my 1-on-1 with my professor on the LLN, it was pointed out to me how the last sentence, “There’s also the aspect of how I was sure I could have my wants be most respected if I put it all in a very formal ‘American’ way, which isn’t a very rare feeling someone else in an English-speaking country would feel.” could be elaborated in a paragraph itself, that there was something there. And it took the majority of my time revising, but I ended up with an LLN that included some deep ideas that would’ve taken a lot more to uncover if I limited myself with perfection early on.

Another advancement to my writing method I learned was that just considering ‘how’ 2 sources connect to each other makes finding a connection between them easier.

In my synthesis, we had to focus on pairs of sources and how they together form an idea. If I assumed the two sources had to either confirm what the other said, add onto the other source, disagree with what the other source said, or complicate the other source, I could classify some connection and elaborate further from that. For example, I used a multimedia source, a Redditor’s comment (MyNamesNotStephanie), and an excerpt from “Mother Tongue” (Amy Tan) and linked them because they both included personal perspectives of why a student would dislike English classes, and Amy Tan’s claim extended “MyNamesNotStephanie’s” claim with a potential cause for the effect. And after I identified this connection, I was able to paraphrase NotStephanie’s assertion in a way that let me mention Amy Tan’s suggestion as a part of the reason.

Lastly, I learned that after putting all your thought into a text, you can use multimedia translations of your paper to highlight specific ideas of your work.

In my first attempt with my LLN, I read out some notable lines from the LLN as a way to summarize the entire LLN for my audience. While acting out parts of the LLN made it feel more significant to me, after listening to my classmates’ translations and how I could leave with a clear idea for each. Something which feels bigger than an average presentation. So in my train of thought to visualize just one idea, for my synthesis essay translation: I thought back to one of my favorite scenes in Jujutsu Kaisen, where one character asks another to consider if his gifts, status, and persona which he built had created who he is as a person, or if it’s the other way around. I decided to parody it by replacing the dialogue with a theme from my synthesis on the relationship between a student’s view of their skills and what education they tried to focus their efforts on into a meme.

Altogether, my time in this course has led me to skills which will help me write with better reflection to who I am as a person while being academically sound through revision. I also improved my ability to identify connections in texts through a process of breaking it down. And lastly, I separated what it means to translate ideas compared to simply presenting them more clearly.