ENGL 2089 is an intermediate composition course that is required for all students at the University of Cincinnati. The course aims to teach students more about literacy: how it develops, how everyone's literacy is different, and how it impacts genre and communication. Going into this course, I was a bit nervous, especially since I was taking the Honors section of the class. I hadn't taken an English class since my senior year in high school, and I was quite confident I had forgotten how to analyze any form of writing in the past two years. However, I quickly realized that my nerves were unfounded, and I would be completely fine. The course was pretty simple, despite the fact that I was taking it during a global pandemic and most of campus looked like a scene out of The Walking Dead. We usually had a few papers to read or videos to watch before class time, and most of class would consist of discussion or getting grossly off-topic when we realized how different our literacy backgrounds were. My favorite part of the class was taking an online quiz that was able to tell me where in the United States my vocabulary aligns most well with (I scored Springfield, Missouri, and Denver, Colorado). As with any composition class, the bulk of the course was spent writing papers. By the end we wrote three, and all were related in some way to the concept of literacy and its impacts in communication and genre. 

Overall, I learned a lot about communication and language in this course. Obviously I expected to go into an English class and write papers, and I definitely improved my skills as a writer. I learned a lot about genre and what can count as a genre (fun fact: it is not just things like rom-com or magical realism), what can impact a person's literacy and the way they communicate, and how to understand to communicate with people that have literacies that are different than my own. This course was a very positive experience. I learned a lot about my capabilities as a writer and was able to push myself to improve my literacy skills.

I have chosen to showcase two of my assigned papers from ENGL 2089. The first is my own personal literacy narrative. For this assignment, we had to choose an event in our lives that we believe had a profound impact on the way we communicate with others. I chose to write about taking care of my dad over the summer. This paper was a wonderful way to reflect on how this experience affected my literacy in ways I had never noticed before, and it was a lot of fun to write. The other paper I have attached is the final one we wrote for the course. We had to write a research paper about a discourse community: a community that has a special way of communicating with one another and similar goals. I chose to write about the National Junior Classical League (NJCL), an organization I was a part of in high school. Writing this paper was a great experience, because I got to look at my time in the NJCL from an outsider's perspective. I learned more about the NJCL's history and was able to reflect on how this community works. Both of these papers exemplify my improved writing skills throughout the course and discuss topics that I am very passionate about, which is why I chose to showcase both of them.