My writing process for the final paper included making an outline with my ideas, just one sentence each. I stated my personal experiences with sexualization because of me being a women, and looked into ways that other people related to this, especially in the sources from class. Then I expanded on each idea more in-depth and started to find sources to support my claims. I left the conclusion and introduction until the end to make sure they clearly reflected what my paper’s purpose was. I learned more about how society views women and how I feel about their judgements against me.

I chose this topic because I’ve deal with sexism a lot being a woman and I think there’s a lot society has to say about women and their sexuality. I’m very open about my sexuality and I get a lot of judgement for it. It was important to me because I was able to relate this topic to personal experiences and say how I felt about them. I think it was actually extremely eye-opening to see my own opinion on paper because it was something I didn’t know I felt strongly about.

My audience is anyone that is ignorant to the inequalities women face when it comes to their sexuality. My purpose was to lay some examples of the sexualization of women out on the table to hold people that contribute to this societal norm accountable. I do this by putting my own personal experiences in my writing.

The focus on societal issues is what led me to write about sexism. I also wanted to focus on a theme that was shown in multiple sources from class. This was one of the themes I could relate to most. I learned better how to transition from each of my thoughts. But I did struggle with the page count. I still have questions about what other forms of sexualizing women’s bodies there are. I think I could find more things within this that I relate to.

At the beginning of the semester I had a lot of questions. I wasn’t sure what would be expected of me attending the University of Michigan. I took two college courses at the community college in my hometown, English 121 and English 122. I didn’t know if this would be enough, so in the DSP Placement I said I was very unconfident with my skills. I had a lot of trouble transitioning, getting enough content into the paper, I needed work with MLA format, and I wanted to improve how I pulled readers in. Throughout the Writing 100 course, I’ve learned a tremendous amount of things. The in class discussions have made me more aware of other perspectives as well as made me gain a deeper understanding of my own views. The assignments are like more practice at writing, but the revising and reflection is what really plays a role in improving my writing skills. The peer edits and meetings with Professor Darling drastically helped me improve my papers. I also got a lot of good things out of doing the reflection. Too often I will just write a paper, skim over it, then submit it. But going back, looking more in-depth at my own work, I find errors and ways to improve. Having to do a reflection forces me to take a deeper look. This writing course has taught me to always take a deeper look at my papers, have people review my papers, I’m better at transitioning from each idea, and I can write something longer than four pages and that was a huge goal for me.