An English class… my least favorite… Not going to lie, I decided to take the Honors course of Intermediate Composition to get a credit out of the way. I thought “If I have to take another English, why not get an experience out of the way”. Well, this mindset lasted about two weeks of the course. Once we started to dig deep into reflections and assignments, I became happy I signed up for the course. 

            Majority of the course covered discourse communities, which is a fancy way of saying a group of people who share commonalities, such as volleyball players, Jewish kids, Midwesterns and doctors. Everybody in the world is a part of many discourse communities. We wrote a total of three essays and each one dealt with a prompt about a discourse community. Through this class, I dug deep into learning about the discourse communities I am a part of. 

            From this experience, I learned a handful of concepts. The most valuable for me was learning that it is completely okay to add personal opinions in essays. From a young age, I was always told “no personal pronouns in academic papers unless it is a personal narrative” from my teachers. The professor for this course encouraged us to share our opinions and thoughts which was new for me. 

            This experience impacted me because it made me realize that I am not a bad essay writer. Like most college students, I used to say essays are the worst assignment ever, it took so much planning and rewrites to get the final product. I always tried too hard to perfect an essay on the first one or two go arounds but all that changed in this class. I began leaving little comments to myself and the professor along the way in my rough drafts to get feedback. I began using many sources to prove my points. I began using a rough outline on my essay that could be rearranged to make sense. These little changes I began to do in this course proved to me that I can write pretty good essays, and since I must write essays in most of my other courses, I have new strategies that work well for me, all from taking this course.