Kaylee's Blog

     My main takeaways from English 101 have to be the class terms. I find myself using specifically chat map and multimodality often in this class but uptake, translingualism, and others are also important terms that I have learned while taking this class and I will most likely be able to use in my day to day life or at least they might be applicable. I do not think I had any big revelations about myself as a writer or researcher or anything during this semester but I have expanded my view about how people interact in the world in general. It mainly reminded me of how much people can communicate without just speaking back and forth with terms like multimodality and translingualism being applied there. There are no specific topics that I would have liked to learn more about because I feel like we went very in depth about everything we discussed and like the phrase “you don’t know what you don’t know” I cannot think of any extra terms that we did not go over that I would have liked to.

  In the past I have had many experiences with peer review, especially in high school. When I consider peer review I almost always think of essays because no other assignment or project in school ever really seems to require it. After writing essays (draft or full) two students would switch their essays, read the other person’s writing, and give constructive criticism in response. This process is done to get an outsider’s perspective, because it leads to being less biased and sometimes you can not always catch your own mistakes. I would describe a “helpful” peer review as two students who care about their writing giving each other genuinely helpful responses in order to better both of their essays. If one of them does not care or cares significantly less than the other one then it will most likely not be a helpful peer review process. After the process of the review itself the original writers must edit their drafts based on the feedback they have received, otherwise it will also not

  I would have never thought about whether or not “English” is singular or plural before this class. At first I immediately thought singular because English is exactly that, but I realized that due to sign language being different in different “languages” like we specifically have American sign language which i would consider to be a version of English. So, although I did not think of English being plural in the same way before taking English 101 as I do now, I did think of it as plural the entire time. My definition has changed to include more now that I have been introduced to terms like multimodality, understanding multimodality expanded my perception of English beyond just spoken or written words. It includes a spectrum of communication modes, from text and speech to images, gestures, and beyond. This broader understanding added to my view of English as a dynamic and adaptable system that goes beyond traditional linguistic boundaries. Translingualism is another class concept that