Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

Through the first half of the semester, we were given four chances to express our understand of articles we would later discuss in class. This gives us a chance to better our writing, make us really think about what we are learning, and propose an interesting point of views that we might have during that reading. From our first blog post to our most current ones you can see differences in our writing in a positive light. At the beginning of the blogs we summarized the readings we had like  did in her first post, but as we got more invested in our readings we began to add our own personal views that agreed or disagreed with the author just like  did in his post. As we got more organized about or posts and remembered to actually do them on our assigned day, we started making an outline of how we were going to write about an article or book. We unknowingly followed the pattern of summarizing the piece of writing, adding in a colleague’s post that we agreed with and related to our own point of view and then like  did, would start to answer the questions the author brought up.

Looking through my own blog posts through this first half of the semester, I noticed that I started following this unwritten outline like many of my classmates.  From my first article review on Disaster Tourism and the Melodrama of Authenticity: Revising the 1889 Johnstown Flood to my last article on A tempest around “Isaac’s Storm” I have seen my writing grow and my insight of these author’s historical questioning grow stronger. I made the goal of bringing in my own thoughts and then using those to decide if the author’s arguments are valid just like many of my colleagues.  Through this, my writings have gotten stronger and my analysis of articles have become more about finding an author’s historical arguments, answering their questions in the article, and finding if they are credible or not instead of just trying to understand what I am reading