Self Assessment
Throughout the time in Individual and society FIQWS classes, I see myself grown as a writer. I started this course with little to few knowledge on writing that I learned from high school. In this course I came in touch with various rhetorical terms, such as rhetorical situations, tone, the audience, purpose, genre, stance, exigence, media/design, and etc. Before, I was only familiar with some of the terms, however I developed my understanding in each of them. Besides, I learned about the other terms and their use in writing or even in real life situations. As for the class, we were required to read and explore a variety of genre and rhetorical situations, which includes: reading articles, journals, short stories, portions from specific books, and etc. These were the main tools to start our exploration of our writing journey. Oftentimes we were given assignments, and similarly we were given time to come together as a whole and discuss our thoughts and ideas as a way of learning from each other. In order to make us get started with writing, we used to get small assignments such as discussion board posts given various situations, and that helped me to recognize and understand each of the rhetorical terms. For instance, we were given a discussion board assignment where it required us to watch videos and read an article about how to structure paragraphs and talk about the “development, coherence and synthesis in paragraph”. This exercise was useful because it made me interpret and understand how to stimulate paragraph based on those particular formats in my own words. Which was an effective way for me to learn because when I interpret something in my own words, I can utilize that leeson into my work effectively.
Nevertheless, this course walked me through many aspects of writing step by step to help me be a better writer. For example, suggesting to me the type of technology and the style to use that would deliver my message to my fellow audience. Besides, the collaboration with my peers through the platform “Turnitin” was one of the important resources that I was given to improve my writing. In my perspective, peer feedback played the most important role in my writing journey to be better because, through each of the peer reviews, I learned new things everytime and was able to see my mistakes that probably was impossible for me to notice by myself. In this class, our first formal assignment was the summary and response essay, which symbolizes my starting as a writer. In that essay, I was able to use my background knowledge and few recent topics learned in this course. However, with the help of teachers and peer’s feedback, I fixed my mistakes and improved on each of the places I was lacking. For example, in my summary and response, I did not do a good job explaining and analyzing the textual evidence and integrating analyzes with my thesis statement. Moreover, I used to have a lack of transitions in my writing which would make it a poor writing with few movements in my essay. My weakness was pointed out in my essay, so I worked on this specific area in my second big assignment, the exploratory essay to make it better, at the same time to show the improvement within the differences made in this new essay. In our next bigger assignment, the criteria were little difficult and concrete to get us to practice higher level writing. We were introduced to how to use the library database and find other important scholarly information, then organizing them using strategies like synthesis, interpretation, argumentation, and etc. This helped me specifically with my Critical Research Analysis essay, and with the help of the library expert and my fellow professors, I came in touch with a new way of looking for reliable and useful information necessary for our chosen topic.
Finally, another important concept that was critical in my development process was knowing how to cite correct sources in a proper way. We had several small assignments where we needed to practice how to incorporate sources, such as in-text citation and work cited pages. For example, there was a discussion board assignment which required us to indicate a floating citation in our essay after reading briefly about the orphan citation or the floating citation. This small exercise played a big role because every time I was explaining and analyzing my evidence, I kept in mind to not leave any evidence as an orphan. Overall, the journey of becoming a better writer was not possible if any of the steps was excluded. Rather, the more we learn, the better we know. Each and every assignment in this class played a role to make the difference between my Summary and Response and the Critical Research Analysis throughout the journey.
It is to be concluded that each and everything I learned in this class, nothing cannot be left behind to tell about my development as a writer. From the start of the Summary and Response essay, to the end of doing the Critical Analysis Research essay, my improvements are largely noticeable. As time passed by, with all the discussion board posts, journal entries, small quizzes on readings, peer reviews, they all intensively played a huge role to make me the writer I became now.
