I have learned from having to read the article several times.  Reviewing the article a second time, I realized that if I had followed the details of the article better the first time, I would have agreed with them more than I did when I wrote the first draft of my critical review.  When I went back a second time, I found parts that I agree with now that I didn't agree with the first time. This is a  new way of reading and writing for me.  Even in MAIS 601 I was only looking at the main point and the details of an article to see if I understood them.  Now I have learned to critically examine the argument. 

The first time I read Fernsten and Reda’s article, I did not understand what they meant about recognizing that you are a writer.  In school, I thought writing was what we did in English class, and I was not good at it.   I remember in Grade 4 the teacher handed back our assignments and for one of them she said that person was a good writer and if we wanted to know how to write, we could go to him. Needless to say that was not my assignment the teacher was talking about.  The teacher did not say to the rest of the class, “You need some help so I'm going to give you some assignments and then you can imagine yourself as good writers.” It was as if we were either born good writers or we weren’t.  Even though the academic journals were already saying in the1980s that people could become good writers, it wasn't being practiced on the ground.  I feel cheated because if this had been practised at the school level I wouldn't have developed a writing phobia about getting my sentences right. 

Fernsten and Reda are saying writing is not all about writing good sentences. Writing includes emails and texts and writing on the job.  If you're emailing or texting a friend you don't worry about punctuation, you just write.  Once I understood what they meant, I realized I didn't have a writing problem in other subjects in school, like social studies or science or public speaking.  I saw a subject like social studies or public speaking as just another course.  In public speaking we had to write down our speeches before we gave them.  In social studies I had to write about the French Revolution.  I didn't see what I was writing about the French Revolution as a writing assignment, I saw it as remembering the key dates and events, and if I got a few sentences wrong it didn't matter. They didn’t mark the assignments for grammar.  In English, which was called creative writing at that time, they focussed on the mechanism of the writing. If you can write smoothly you are a good writer. If in school I had known I was writing in all my subjects, but I was not getting good grades in English or some other subject, then I would have seen myself as just having difficulty in some courses, not as being a bad writer. Now that I understand what Fernsten and Reda mean, it is almost like therapy, I can understand what happened to me in school and I can see that I am not phobic about all types of writing.

What changed for me now is that I want to be a good writer.  In high school, the reading and writing I did was just to remember what I was being told.  I was good at remembering the dates and the events, but I never tried to understand why the French revolution happened. After this critical review assignment I am going deeper than I used to.  If I was in Grade 9 now with my understanding of reading and writing now, I would have asked why the French Revolution was happening. What was the political context, the political influences, and what was the social context, the social and cultural reasons that gave people a need to rebel against the monarchy?

I want to go deeper into the subjects now and understand them better.  Because I understand better, I can also write better.  Being able to understand something well enough to put it into writing gives me deeper insight and makes me more comfortable writing.

What a critical review has allowed me to do is look at my whole education going forward in a new way, Everything I read from now on I'm going to be critically reviewing – does this person's conclusion stand on the merits of his argument? 

Fernsten, Linda A. and Mary Reda. "Helping students meet the challenges of academic writing." Teaching in Higher Education 16.2 (2011): 171-82.