Reflection

At the beginning of this course, I didn’t really think much of peer review and the whole revision process, as all the writing courses I had taken previously tended to overlook the entire process. As the semester progressed, I found myself benefiting greatly from comments made by peers, reverse-outlining, and many other strategies I earned in this class. I often found myself reworking entire paragraphs, leaving nothing but one or two sentences unchanged, or scrapping paragraphs entirely. This led to my essays possessing a more coherent and logical flow, as well as clear sentences and wording (an issue I often found myself losing points over). I also was able to learn to use quotes better, as I tended to use them more purely for information, rather than for supporting my argument and introducing another point of view. I enjoyed the research process overall. At the beginning, I had a clear idea of my topic and where I wanted to take it, however, along the way, I discovered a number of perspectives that complicated my thesis, requiring me to rework my essay to address them. My outlook on the topic also changed as I gathered information and synthesized them together. Originally, I was going to argue that AI was intelligent when it could empathize, however, after reading a number of examples describing emotional emulation, I realized that my definition had to be more specific and complex to reflect the complex nature of the field, and instead shifted over to arguing that an AI is intelligent and alive when it developed an ego or personality. Over the course of this class, I believe my writing has developed favorably, which may help in the future, despite the fact that I’m not going to be doing as much writing in the future as an engineer.