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Kadijah Holder
UWRT 1103
September 27, 2015
Midterm
As the class continues to travel deeper into the semester, I am beginning to practice and
develop more of an understanding of a few of the ten Key Concepts listed in the syllabus.
Lately, I have been practicing independent inquiry and curiosity through the onset of the research
project. In the third blog post, I had to initiate my curiosity of natural hair and formulated the
question, Why has the natural hair phenomena among black women become so increasingly
popular? which requires independent research on opinions from different black women, both
natural and non-natural. I found two different opinions; one from a naturalista named Kenneth (I
Hate The Natural Hair Movement,) and another from a relaxed blogger named EbonyCPrincess
(So What If Natural Hair Is A Trend?) with both opinions being opposite of one another. This
inquiry allowed me to view the natural hair trend from others perspectives and understand that
not all black women actually like the movement or find it as intriguing as I do.
Another key concept that I have engaged with in this course is getting out of my comfort
zone. Initially, I didnt understand what the purpose of this course was or what to expect from it.
However, the different workshops that the class has participated in has allowed me to get out of
my comfort zone by talking with other class members, reading their essays, and assisting others
in improving their writing, as well as our own writing. I havent had much experience with some
of the different workshops that Ms. Ingram has held in class, although, they are quite interesting
and help my writing. Most students are accustomed to teachers and peers simply scanning the

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paper for correct use of grammar and re-writing sentences for them. In these workshops, we use
some of the concepts mentioned in the textbook Who Says as we review and critique others
work. Some of the concepts used are considering the writer, audience, purpose, and topic.
The final concept that I have engaged in during this course is multi-modality of print and
digital texts. I didnt fully understand the concept until we analyzed the different modes in the
short poem about sitting inside a car on a Monday. I tried to include multiple modes in my
website; visual and gestural with the background of my website that has a girl cutting her long,
straight her to short, curly hair and below her the words big chop, spatial with the placement of
my visual bibliography in the middle of the page and it being the only item on that page, and
linguistic in my about page where it says, Welcome to My Blog Page! these choice of words
are warm and inviting to the reader.
There are also some concepts that are still challenging for me such as rhetorical
knowledge. Ms. Ingram gave the definition of rhetoric as purposeful language use also the
most straightforward definition that helped me understand rhetoric a bit more. She also believes
that rhetoric can be in anything, but I sometimes still have a hard time looking at things
rhetorically. This is tricky for me because most of my English teachers didnt really focus on
rhetoric, rather character analysis and perfecting thesis statements. I could better engage myself
in this particular concept by attempting to practice looking for rhetoric in different texts, not just
literature.
The final challenging concept is composing processes. This is challenging for me because
sometimes I dont understand the feedback I receive or how to utilize the feedback. My group
told me to incorporate more of my writers voice into my exploratory essay, but thats
challenging since I dont necessarily know what my writers voice is or how to find it. I could

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better engage with this concept the second half of the course by further questioning my group in
what they believe my writers voice is and visiting the writing resource center to get more
assistance.
Some of the ten key concepts have proven to be useful in the course so far, and others
require a bit more practice. I look forward to learning more about the other concepts not
mentioned and hopefully gain a better understanding of the concepts that I found challenging.