Writing transformation

This course has opened my eyes in a lot different ways. I have learnt to become a  critical reader and a critical writer. It has made me change my reading and writing completely and through looking back to my past work I realized that my second and third portfolio has nothing to do with the first or with the responses I did at the really beginning of the course. By going trough my first project I have remembered how my writing used to be: very stiff, objective and boring. However, in my second project the transformation of my writing becomes obvious. I feel the second project  much more  “mine” and by reading it you can tell that I was much more involved in this one that in the first one and this is what probably caused the transformation of my writing. I have learned to get involved in what I write by coming up with my own ideas and theories which I then needed to share with my audience and to develop them in my projects as good and clear as possible. Moreover, the challenge of having to show some relation with the writer we were analyzing has made me become more demanding and I have ended up putting much more thinking into each of my projects therefore achieving a better result. The improvement from my first to my second project is obvious: the design of the project is much better, the distribution of the pages is more logic, in the second project the ideas flow very well and there is a big connection between my work and Paulo Freire’s work whereas in the first project my work doesn’t really have to do with what Richard Rodriguez does in The achievement of Desire. Furthermore, in my second project I get rid of my strong idea of always writing as if it was for a paper and I put in practice what writing a project means. Even though there is also a change between my second project and this final one, it is not so obvious and the differences rely more on the reading each of the projects are based on. I will be going through this second change in the next page when analyzing Miller.

 However, I didn’t want this page to be aimed at pointing out all the negative aspects of my first project compered to my second. Instead, while doing this comparison I am trying to make obvious the great transformation my writing has experienced in just a few months. But what are the facts which caused this big change in my writing? There is a  very long process behind this transformation and it has its starting point in the first piece of writing we had to do for the fist class of the course describing our last writing experiences. When I started to think about my past as a writer I realized how poor my writing experiences were and I started to think that one of the causes which made me be a bad writer was my academic education where reading and writing had little importance. Secondly, reading about the philosophy of the course made me realize that my perception of reading and writing was poor and wrong. I had always thought of reading for three purposes: to learn, to communicate and to have fun. However, I had never thought about a writer wanting to say something to the reader or as the reader being responsible for replying to those ideas the author was trying to transmit to him or her. We then moved to read "The Achievement of Desire" and to analyze it. Richard Rodriguez guided me to think about how inefficient the education I had received was. This is why for my first project I started to do research on different education systems until I found one which fascinated me: The theory of multiple intelligences. However, before having read "The Achievement of Desire" I had never questioned myself whether the way I was being educated was the best one or not. I limited myself to get good grades in the courses I was taking. With this first project I also put in practice the idea of responding to the author and I discovered the world of digication, which was completely new for me. I had to carry out the change from writing a paper to writing a project.

To conclude, the process just explained contributed in transforming my writing in every single aspect. In this course I have learned hundreds of things such as the following: I have learned to get involved with my writing, to become critical and thoughtful and to come up with my own ideas, to connect those ideas to the readings they were based on, to communicate not only with text but also with other media, to give importance to the way my work was being presented (typography, design, distribution of the pages…), to understand that this presentation says as much as a piece of writing, to become aware of my audience and to give a reason to my writing. Consequently, I believe that I have become a much better writer and I hope to continue putting in practice all the writing skills I have learned in this course.