Ally's Final Reflection

 First, I want to highlight how helpful Harris’ book was in providing me with specific writing strategies to use. I particularly like countering and forwarding the most, and I often found myself using them in the composition of my final project. I never knew that I could layout for readers my thought process like that until I read Harris’ book, then saw it utilized in McCulloch’s book. It has honestly made me a better writer. I can not only practice these new strategies but I can also recognize where and how I am utilizing them; a concept I was always a little fuzzy on in the past. 

I also want to take a moment to highlight how helpful the blogs were. It was nice to be able to present cool things I thought about each week in fairly informal media, where others can give their input on it. It was also really cool to be able to use my creative juices in inserting pictures and links that connect to my post for the unit. Though I liked answering the questions on the forums, it did not feel as satisfying as writing a blog post and asking for feedback on a cool idea that you came up with while reading Harris or McCulloch. 

I also want to talk about how cool it was to be examining the internet in the way that we did this semester. Reading McCulloch’s research was eye-opening, and it even made me think about how internet speech has changed even from the time she had written the book in 2019 to recently in 2021. It was fun and fascinating to apply the observations we talked about in class to my own feeds on Twitter and Instagram.