First Semester English Class
My first semester of college has not been very fun, as it has been an isolating experience. In High School for comparison, teachers would actually know our name and would make students participate among those around them and in front of the whole class. In that way, my English 110 class has been a sort of escape from a typical college course to something of a mixture of the old and the new. In this class, we were encouraged to show up, participate and fraternize amongst ourselves. This class is also comforting in a way that doesn’t take away from learning college level analysis and writing. Along the way I learned many things from my peers and professor including, that writing takes team work, that splitting the work allows students to showcase their best work, that expressing oneself doesn’t require the use of standard English, and that being able to understand multiple languages is a superpower.
The greatest thing I learned from this class has to be that writing is a collaborative process. For most of high school, we were expected to write to just get it done. We wrote as fast as possible and only worried about the content. But in my English 110 class I finally experienced something different than that. We had peer reviews for almost everything. We were also encouraged and sometimes forced into going to the writing center and attending office hours. In every single one of these collaborations, I have greatly improved upon my writing. In the most recent office Hours appointment, where I wanted to go over both my final drafts of the Language and Literature Narrative and my Synthesis Essay, Professor Macagnone pointed out 11 different mistakes in my narrative and 43 different mistakes in my Synthesis Essay. Both of these pieces looked totally complete. One was already in my portfolio and the other was set up to go into my portfolio. But by going to office hours I realized how much I could still improve on these pieces of work to make it the best I can. I have also come to appreciate how we pretty much get the opinion and insight of more than 3 people on a single piece of work. I also noticed how every single form of reviews I attended led to different suggestions and have for the most part really impacted my final draft.
One thing I have also appreciated during the writing process of all the previous essays was that we split up the draft into sections. Meaning, we would have to write a few pages and get a peer to review that first before moving on to the rest of the essay. Splitting up the work has both made it easy for students to juggle other courses but also made it easier for students to not rely on AI to do their entire work. I remember in the first week of class, we were having a discussion on AI uses for doing assignments and one student spoke up and said “Many students simply just wait till the last minute and are left with no choice but to have AI do their entire essay.” (Taha Ibrahim) That really resonated with me because in the past when teachers would assign big assignments due in a considerate amount of time, I would always end up procrastinating and using AI to help me complete the work faster. I really do believe that if not for this way of assigning work, I would have fallen into my old ways and and just cheated.
Throughout the semester, we had a theme of looking at works that write about Non-Strandard English and academic writing. By analyzing and reading these works both individually and as a class, I now know that fluency in the use of standard English is not an indicator of a person’s intelligence or articulations. The most important piece of work that led me to understand this was the academic essay, “Should Writers Use They Own English?” written by Vershawn Ashanti Young, a prominent scholar, author and performance artist. In his essay he responds to Stanley Fish’s claim that there is only one correct way to speak and write. In his essay, Young argues that all forms of English should be allowed and embraced in academic writing by sharing other academics’ stances and by just writing his academic essay in a non-standard way. Young, in his essay, writes “Instead, it mean that the one set of rules that people be applyin to everybody’s dialects leads to stereotypes that writers need “remedial training” or that speakers of dialects are dumb.”(Young,6) Even though Young doesn’t write his essay in academic English which is in most cases looked at as the most articulate and intelligent form of English, Young still delivers his claim so that it’s very coherent and more importantly it’s true to Young’s sense of self and dialect.
We didn’t only read works that examined non-standard English, we also wrote many pieces with our takes on language. Through one of these pieces, the Synthesis essay, I learned that being multilingual can help share ideas and values across cultures. In my Synthesis essay “A Case For English As A Global Lingua Franca,” I wrote that with the use of another language like English “people would be able to share their ways of life and maybe innovations and techniques they have acquired to a much larger community.” Language is not merely a technical skill, it is a powerful way to convey cultural perspectives and ensure these views and ideas don’t get lost in translation.
This English class has been very different from most of the ELA classes I had in the past. It allowed me to understand that the writing process is a joint effort, that little proficiency in Standard English doesn’t mean you are stupid and that being multilingual allows people to reach a broader audience. I think this semester’s English class was the most perfect introduction to how literature and language is viewed and approached at the college level. I hope to be able to continue to improve upon my skill and test out my newly acquired teachings.
Work Cited:
Taha Ibrahim (student) in discussion with the author, September 2025
Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Should Writers Use They Own English?” Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, edited by Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan, Utah State University Press, 2011, pp. 61-72.
