Dear Future students,

Over the past quarter I have learned and acquired certain skills after taking this class that I can add to my repertoire of writing skills. Of course, in order for ourselves to become better writers we must first read from other academic scholars who have written to widen our spectrum of understanding. The scholars that you read will vary depending on the professor teaching but the ones I read about included James Paul Gee, Wayne C. Booth, and Mary Pratt Louise. By joining their conversations in their essays we can begin to understand the meaning and values of their terms, to write our own essays and improve the way we write. English 101 is not like the traditional standard high school way, instead it leaves the conversation open for critical inquiry and open mindedness for other scholars to join in our own conversations we create.

            To begin, I want to talk about coming up with a Critical Inquiry Question from reading Gee. The essay I first read in English 101 was from Gee called “What is Literacy” and Gee uses many terms to arrive to his answer that literacy reveals the control of a secondary discourse that uses a common language. Gee explains the primary discourse choses you, the one you are born into and the secondary discourse is a group with a shared set of values, the ones you choose to be part of. From this, I decided to choose my own secondary discourse that I have been firmly attached to which is the discourse community of YouTube. Communication occurs between online interactions of comments of a video on a channel, each channel has a certain channel leader, in my case Pyro, and subscribers to him which can be thought of as his followers, the individuals viewing Pyro’s content. I created my first critical inquiry question contemplating Gee’s observation that the discourse is before the individual. I pondered that, “If Gee believes that the discourse is before the individual, then how can the YouTube community be created if the channel is made by an individual?” (Wills 1). This alone question provided the foundation to my conversation for my essay that could not be answered by a simple yes or no answer. As an effective critical inquiry question takes time to develop that other questions can be derived upon from, it creates a path for others to see new ways of thinking to bring forth new conversations. I later asked myself another question, “If every YouTube channel posted the same content, then how would individual YouTube channels keep their subscribers as well as gain the interest of new people into their community?” (Wills 3). Critical inquiry asks many questions throughout the essay, in order to refine our initial hypothesis expanding our ideas. But critical inquiry we cannot answer right away and requires elaborate evidence to back up our hypotheses. This is what keeps a discourse communities together, the need for people to talk about their discourse and the passion they share by the questions they ask. Once we have mastered how to create an effective critical inquiry question, we can then move onto the evolving thesis.

            For the next essay, our class introduced Wayne C. Booth’s essay “Blind Skepticism versus a Rhetoric of Assent” which added terms including rhetoric of assent and blind assent, drastically changing my conversation to my essay. Now, I understand why people assent to new understandings in conversations because of the blind assent or primary discourse values they were a part of. Rhetoric is the entire range of understanding in communication according to Booth. Pyro demonstrates his rhetoric of assent by listening to the viewer’s suggestions. Pyro replies to a comment, “I appreciate the suggestion but there's going to be very little Minecraft on here. I'm currently not enjoying the game that much, maybe when an update comes out” (Channel Update). Knowing that Pyro listens to people commenting on his videos, he adds them into account before making a choice whether to dedicate himself to a full series on that game. My thesis evolved from knowing that there are significant differences between the thousands of subscribers to Pyro, to finding the common ground between Pyro and viewer, which each side has to assent to keep the community and his channel going to this day. The reasoning for multiple revisions to your initial thesis demonstrates a gain of new understandings, the purpose is to display a growth in thinking for our analysis of critical inquiry to question ourselves and ask more we did not consider to our conversations the first time. To make sure that our conversations are credible, we need to make sure that we have enough citation packages to prove our main points to our revised thesis.

            Furthermore, our last scholar that my class introduced was Mary Louise Pratt's “Arts of the Contact Zone” which added multiple topics to talk about namely the contact zone, imaginary community and safe houses. Around halfway through my final essay, I changed the word discourse to equal the ideas of the safe house as Pratt’s and Gee’s shows more relations between each other than Gee and Booth. Whether the given evidence supports or complicates your hypothesis is useful to whether the information can be used in our own conversations. Pratt states, “It is assumed that all participants are engaged in the same game and that the game is the same for all players” (Pratt 113). By using this quote, you can create a citation package by explaining the relevance the scholar’s essay impacts our own inquiry. I personally, did not agree with what Pratt was saying, as it conflicts with my discourse’s values. Being an outsider, not trying the different games before judging them and noticing that everyone has their own opinions or views on a game to how they play their game. The contact zone I describe as Pyro having authority over his viewers as the outsiders want him to play games they demand from him even though it might not please Pyro, he does not ban comments from his channel as everyone has a right to post their opinions. Not all outsiders of the discourse are making these demands, however based on my observations some of these comments are recommendations to games Pyro might enjoy and has not discussed yet on his videos. Learning about citation packages helped me become more focused in my writing knowing that I introduce a quote, explain its relevance, and how that relevance extends my argument.                                                                                                                                   

              In conclusion, by assenting and coming to terms with these scholars I was able to frame my concepts that I pulled from their essays that I saw reflected on my own discourse community. To all the future English 101 students reading this retrospective essay I will leave with this that, English 101 allows more freedom then the traditional writing courses as you decide what your passionate for to talk about to use these concepts and master them. We can learn them in English 101 but we have to acquire them ourselves and learn there is value beyond just this class to continue inquiry throughout our college carriers so we can talk and join other scholars’ conversations from our own essays. I have learned a lot from reading these scholars, the classroom and from my peers this quarter, and I hope you can see value in my conversation, to add in your future in academia.