Cathy Luy
Oliver St. John
FIQWS 10103
11 December 2019
During this semester, I grew as a writer. I entered this class not expecting to learn much, but rather to only continue to use the skills I’ve been using throughout high school. Through working on the literacy narrative, exploratory essay, and the researched critical analysis essay, I’m now able to write longer and more thorough essays. After this course, I now have a better understanding of who I’m writing to and the purpose of my writing.
For the three writing assignments, I had a similar approach for completing them; I understood what’s being asked, read and annotated the required texts, wrote the first draft, had it reviewed by classmates, edited it into a final draft, and then turned it in. Although the process was relatively the same, my skills for reading, drafting, revising, and editing grew after each assignment. I always had skills for reading and annotation, considering it’s a skill that I’ve been using since middle school, but throughout this course, I had an overall improvement in the way I can understand a text. I understood the text quicker, I didn’t really feel the need to reread the articles in order to have a better understanding of the text.
I got better at writing first drafts when I understood the importance of it. At the start of the semester, the length of my first draft was two paragraphs and by the end of the semester, my first draft was two pages long. As the semester progressed and more in-class workshops were conducted, I started to understand that first drafts meant more than just something that I turned in for credit, it was extremely beneficial for the writer. The use of first drafts was to help me with my writing process and to flesh out all my ideas in order to make a well written and detailed final essay.
For revising and editing, I started to take my peer’s feedback more seriously, understanding that their feedbacks was coming from someone who wasn’t accustomed to my writing style, so it provided a different perspective of how I could’ve improved my writing. I started to use their feedback when I was editing my essays, which resulted in my essays being more well written. In addition, with the required page or word count, I had a better understanding of what’s required of my essay when I was revising and editing. If my essay wasn’t at the required length, I knew that I had to elaborate on my ideas and reasonings more.
When writing the literacy narrative, I was aware that I had to tell a story about my experience with reading and writing. Luckily, in high school, I had a class where my teacher focused on introspection, where we reflect on ourselves, which helped me with this assignment. I was able to recall memories and analyze them in a way that I did during high school. This essay was for me to have a better understanding of who I was as a writer; written with the intent to be non-fiction where I got personal about my skills and who I am as a writer, discussing moments of reading and writing and how that affected me by using pathos. In addition to the narrative, it was also intended to connect with other authors and their literacy narratives.
When writing my exploratory essay, I noticed was that the formating of it was going to be completely different compared to my literacy narrative essay. This essay highlighted the different discourse writing, and how although two articles are written based on the same topic, the way in which it’s written shows that it’s intended for different audiences, different discourses. Through writing this essay, I realized that articles have a specific genre, purpose, and media. The authors of the two articles had a different method of writing, they had an intended audience for writing, whether it was for people who wanted a quick read or people who wanted a deep dive on a topic. I conveyed this in my essay by summarizing the two articles, comparing the differences between them, and used ethos when citing credible sources in proving my argument.
For the exploratory essay, I was required to find my own articles to use. At first, it was somewhat challenging to find relevant articles, but through specific filtering, I was able to find articles that were fitting for the different discourse communities. I was required to find two separate articles from different discourse communities based on the same topic. In order to achieve that, I found my scholar article through Google Scholars using keywords that related to my topic and applied filters to find articles that were published within the last few years; and for my popular article, I found my article by searching up the keywords on the Google search engine and finding articles that were published on websites that weren’t known to be bias.
Taking a similar approach to the exploratory essay, for the researched critical analysis essay, I used Google Scholars to find my articles relating to neuroscience and criminal law and used ethos to convey my argument. On top of ethos, pathos and logos were also used. Similar to the other two assignments, strategies like critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation were present; analysis the articles, interpreting its meaning and using the different articles to support my argument.
Besides the three essays, this course also focused on a portfolio website and in-class assignments like peer reviews, peer review letters, free writes, class discussions, and brainstorming sessions. The in-class assignments allowed an environment for the students to develop both collaborative and social writing skills. When discussing the media aspect behind this class, the three essays had a similar media, which was the basic essay writing format, but the portfolio and the peer review letters had different media. The portfolio focused on displaying the writer’s work throughout the semester, and the peer review letter took the form of a letter that was sent via email, which in a way was less formal.
Overall, I believe that I improved as a writer through completing the assignments and understanding the course objectives. I gained an understanding of the different discourse communities and the importance of them. Another skill I gained was that using proper MLA citation when I was quoting authors and creating work-cited pages for my essays. Although this course mainly used digital technologies, newspaper articles and books were used during this course. The use of publishing writing on digital technologies creates a more accessible method for everyone, even though the writing’s intended for a specific audience. In a way, print was used in the form of a digital copy. For all the essays, they were technically written for my professor, but in general, they were for different discourse communities.
