May 11th, 2016

Instructor Jizi,
In UWRT 1102 I have come to know more ways to write literature, listen, research, take
notes, and analyze documents. In UWRT 1102 new ways of writing, such as learning how to
write an inquiry paper, has improved my writing in order to differentiate my writing and easily
get my points across no matter what the purpose of my writing may be. In this class, we have
learned about happiness, expression, inquiry, and better methods of research. The theme of
happiness brought out the ability to think about happiness in a new light, and for me personally
gave me the ability to think about what was happiness to me and inspired by inquiry topic. In the
past, without help from this University, I would not be as good of a researcher, writer and editor
as I am today.
In the class we performed ten minute sessions of freewriting every day. I found that this
increased my creativity and it allowed me to free my mind of all the things I was thinking about
and create more room for thinking in the class. Although I did not include any of my free writes
in my portfolio they were a great advantage of this class in order to start each session new with a
clear head. Online, our class had forums, I included mine in my eportfolio section of happiness.
In these forums we usually responded to a question or issue and gave our opinions on it. Two to
three classmates would respond to our forum and we would reply on two or three others. This
really got all of us to communicate in a new way and share ideas of thinking that we may not
normally do. Others insight is always helpful in the creative process because you can get
feedback and ideas on what works and what doesnt. I found that one of the most useful
resources of this class. In class we also learned about researching and this is reflected in our
assigned readings and double journal entries, which I have included in my happiness tab of my

portfolio. In our text book, Pursuing Happiness, we had to read multiple sections and write
down key points and responses to those points. This really taught me as a reader to read the
whole thing through to get the main point as a whole and then go back through and find the
important statements that make up this idea. Because of these assignments I know use this
technique in research and also in reading and studying textbooks while taking notes. I found
these to be the easiest assignments and the most eye opening because as a reader they opened my
mind with their context of happiness and as a writer they made me more aware of how to find
research and even gave me ideas of how to structure my own literatures. The double entry
journals also found their way into formulating our other essays, such as the inquiry journal where
we had to find one article to kick start our research.
One of the first essays, What Happiness Means to Me, we had to come up with something
that happiness means to us, under the personal essay tab. We as writers had to come up with our
own subtopic of happiness, what happiness truly meant to us and create a unique paper, different
from everyone else. This was difficult for me but after sitting a while and actually thinking and
prioritizing what was special to me and what makes me happy I started forming ideas together
and just started writing. I used to write my papers like this sometimes, but after this paper I
realized how important it has come to me to write outlines so I do not become lost in my
thoughts or accidentally repeat myself, as I have done many times in my earlier writings without
meaning to. I enjoyed this essay because it was not formally structured and we could write about
whatever we wanted that would fill the requirement. If I could go back and do it different I
would plan, the clustering technique, and I would definitely write an outline.
Our second essay came from our extended inquiry research, in the extended research tab.
This paper for me was especially hard for me because I had a hard time deciding on a subject or

topic for my overall project. I changed my mind multiple times, from ideas of marriage across
the centuries, to equality, to finally religion and happiness, and could not grasp the idea of what I
needed to do.

After asking questions to my professor, my peers, and reading over the

instructions I finally figured out what I needed to do and decided upon a topic: religion. After
coming to a conclusion on what I wanted to research, the project became much easier and fun for
me. Researching about happiness and its connections with religion really resonated with me and
it was easy for me to really dive in and put in effort in this subject. I had to really dig deep into
what really fascinates me and what can I actually write an inquiry paper about. I felt that the
research essay was one of the hardest or challenging assignment of this class because I did have
troubles finding my topic and what to do with it. At first a found an encyclopedia of religions
and thought it would be helpful and it helped me start off on a good foot about each religion and
helped me branch out but once it came to the actual paper I found it quite useless because I did
not want to include the beginnings of each religion in fear of it sounding too research history
paper like.

The other sources I found were mostly results of studies between happiness

associated with Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. This helped me conclude and show that there is
absolutely a positive correlation between religion and happiness with all religions. My last
article was the effect of happiness on health as well as happiness and this made me curious to
possible future research. My research surprised me, that every religion had similar levels of
happiness and all of them had a positive correlation. I found a lot of information about happiness
connected to brain chemicals and how that affects happiness and health and this further
interested me in future research. If I could start over I would have definitely gone more specific
into the brain chemistry aspect of it all. I also struggled writing the paper itself because I had
never written an inquiry document before, I did not know how to set up the format our how to

structure the format of the paragraphs. I feel like I wrote more formally which is my usual style,
I life writing more formally because I am used to writing research papers and it is my preferred
style. Researching was not hard once we found out how to find actual credible and reliable
sources. Throughout the class we talked about better ways to research and it is reflected
throughout my portfolio that researching was a part in almost everything in the class, almost
every assignment section has a research or notes subsection. I learned better ways of researching
and even found other ways of researching that my peers practice thanks to the forum on research
methods. My critique group often gave me great feedback on if I was following my outline and
requirements of the assignment and not repeating myself. I feel like I did not really receive
much critique about the writing itself so much and I was maybe a little disappointed in that
factor. I have similarly undertaken a project where I have had to pick my topic and narrow it
down as I write but I have never had to write an inquiry document where I could not go back and
change anything and had to write about the research as well as the journey, as compared to past
papers that were research paper based. As a learner I learned that I am better at learning when I
write something down.
In connection with the Inquiry research and essay we also had to perform a Genre project,
which projects our findings in a new light, under the genre tab. I found this generally easy, but I
do not think that I did mine in a traditional sense. Instead of putting the results of the studies in a
chart or graph and simply presenting it, I decided to find resources that provided a connection to
my research but were household known movies and books that were designed to reach people
my age. I read the book Heaven is for real and watched the movie Gods Not Dead and wrote
about their inpact on me and what I think they could be on others, and how it can relate to people

my age. I summarized that sources and connected them back to my purpose and intended
audience of adolescents who may be struggling to find the missing piece in their lives.
Throughout our writing processes, we were always placed in groups and asked for peer
feedback and group work on what was working or not and what could ultimately be changed and
made better. This group work made my work better because I got an outside perspective on my
papers and assignments and I got to see how I could change things around to affect different
audiences, especially an audience of my peers. Editing and revising was made easier with peer
feedback because they had an unbiased view on the document. After all, a writer wants to please
its audience so why not go to a general representative of my audience and take suggestions. I
found the feedback very helpful and I tried to give productive feedback myself. Editing came
from the group and revising came on my own. Revising can be seen through the multiple drafts
under each essay section and subsection and editing from my peers can also be seen towards the
end of the documents. Overall, these elements helped me see how I can connect to different
audiences and adjust accordingly, and also take a look at my own papers with an unbiased point
of view.
I think that my most important work of this class was the reading assignments and double
entry journals we completed during this class. While they were the assignments that did not hold
as nearly as much weight as the other assignments or papers, it still inspired be to think of my
inquiry project and opened my perspective to happiness. The readings helped me think critically
and form opinions and gain knowledge on happiness and cognitive behavior of happiness. I
learned many new facts about happiness, including the science behind and and that happiness is
predetermined by genes, hormones, and other chemicals. The most surprising thing I learned
from the readings is that one cannot do much to improve their capacity for happiness. As a

writer I learned how to use a double entry journal and realized its effectiveness as a way of
gathering, sorting, and analyzing information to better understand and write about it. I found that
the portfolio was the most fun and exciting assignment because we got to piece our works
together in a creative way of our choosing and really make it out own.
My strengths are focusing on making my papers as best as they can be, meaning I love
revision and editing. I am good at planning, outlines, and writing everything out that I must
include, which makes me make sure I meet the requirements of every assignment. My weakness
would have to be procrastination and sometimes research. Sometimes I hold off on working on
something if I am given long amounts of time to do something because I take care of more
urgent stuff first and forget about the small things. Another weakness I have was not being
creative, which is still a struggle with me. I am also a little indecisive with topic decisions if I
have to come up with my own. Through this class I have learned new techniques to help me cut
down on these weaknesses and I have even learned strategies to further my strengths. I have
made much progress from the beginning and especially since the beginning of my writing career.
Within this class I have gained the ability to be more creative with topic (inquiry research), think
and analyze more critically (DEJ assignments), and find more productive means of finding topics
and making outlines and performing research (Happiness and Inquiry paper). I learned how to
be a stronger writer and this will help me throughout my next three years of my collegiate career.
In short, this class has taught me a lot about literature, writing, critical thinking,
credibility, and most importantly happiness. So much so that I think my writing has evolved and
become better due to the fact that I know now what to look for when editing according to what
the assignment is asking for. One I know what to do with my paper I can write it easier. I have

thoroughly enjoyed my time in UWRT 1102 and it has taught me things about writing that I will
certainly carry on throughout my days at UNC Charlotte.