Overall when I reflect on my semester in Seminar I see my biggest improvement in writing. I also learned how to read an article or story a lot better by not only just reading over it but by taking notes and having to write about it. I used these tools I learned for each assignment making my writing better with each one. I know I can use these tools in the future to help me in classes where I need to read and write, but beyond that is knowing now how to dissect an article that I may read outside of class to see what the author really meant and how he used his words to do so. With that said here are some of favorite assignments from this semester.

Some of my favorite assignments from this class were:

-The 9/11 commemoration, this assignment was really interesting to me because we got to gather many photos and articles about the event and find something that stuck out to us and then write a paper with the evidence we found to make a point. Unlike other assignments we had a lot of time to do this so we could plan out which evidence we wanted to gather for our point. This taught me how to look for articles and photos to make a point, and how to write a paper that how a strong back bone that you can defend.

Also from the 9/11 commemoration assignment it included my most memorable moment from this class when we went to the 9/11 museum.  I thought it was really interesting how as a class we went to the museum and all saw the same thing but we all walked away with different thoughts and ideas. In the end we all wrote different papers on a very strong subject.

Another assignment I thought was really memorable was the Visual Dialogue.

-Visual Dialogue by Oliver Dorian

For my Visual Dialogue I chose a photo of segregation on a subway platform by Ernest Cole and segregation between two water fountains by Elliott Erwitt. I chose to do my Visual Dialogue on these two photographs because that both represent that having separate but equal places was not actually equal at all. As you can see in the Ernest Cole photo the colored people have their own place on the subway platform but it is small and squashed with many people while the white area is spacious. In the Elliott Erwitt photograph the two water fountains are unequal, the whites fountain is cleaner and more expensive, while the colored fountain is cheap and dirty.

Looking at what I wrote I remember how hard it was to write about something very powerful yet so subtle in a photograph. I had to look beyond the physical picture, to look and see what Ernest Cole and Elliot Erwitt were thinking and what they wanted to convey when they took these photographs.