Throughout this semester in English 21003 I learned many different new skills in my writing. I have seen many new improvements that I noticed back in high school. I have been struggling to write well detailed essays, or responses, but now it’s not that hard to do. Since in college they have higher expectations for us to improve since we got to write well and elaborate. We did a lot of writing in these past few months. For example, like rhetorical analysis essays, literature review essays, we did a group project which was a public awareness campaign, and the self assessment which I am writing now. As a writer I can see the importance when one writes about their thoughts and ideas because they want to be able to express themselves and give their ideas. When an author writes they want to make sure that they get to the purpose as to why other people need to hear their story.
There were many course learning outcomes throughout the semester. We became better at reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self assessment. There was many assignments that required us to read so we can accomplish out homeworks, we ready different stories for example one of them was mother tongue which was about how this girl realized that they was having a hard time to speak english. Saying how people made fun of her mom accent and there are too many people that judge one another. She had a hard time accepting the way she talked but she ended up accepting her background. Telling this story and sharing it for people to read helps those who aren’t confident because many new people don’t know english. We also drafted so many essays before making the final one, this actually helped us a lot because at the same time we get it revised from someone then after that we are able to see what they think we need to get better at and make edits to improve it. For example, for our literature review we had to bring copies of our work then we would get this worksheet that we look at and see in a checklist what it is that the person is missing and write notes about it.
Another course learning outcome that was accomplished was to discover how connecting to certain subjects, to your own experiences or history, or to other writers can make writing more meaningful to you. This one assignment, which was to think about our favorite writing assignment that we have done, made us reflect on what was meaningful to me. A writing assignment that I did was from last semester when I had to write a narrative essay about myself. I had to reflect about my past to come up with a topic. Another assignment that we did was a description of a thing where we had to write about an object that was important. A piece that I wrote was “Right outside my door. Whenever I come back home I see two dogs running up to me so excited to see me. One of him is called Jerry and the other one is called Jason. I am thinking about all the memories I have had with them during all those fun times.” This was pretty interesting that we did since we had to think about an experience we thought about.
To add on, another course learning outcome that we were able to accomplish was practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects. For each of our writing assignments we needed to have sources so we could back up our opinion, but when looking for sources we had to make sure that we were looking up scholarly articles to make sure they were good and updated to use. What was really helpful for us was when we had to do our research assignment of finding articles. We also had a mini lecture that showed us how to use the school library website because there are different ways when you do research. Also we learn that we can also access the books that’s there if we need them. We have to request it and there is help from librarians.
Furthermore, another course learning outcome that I was able to accomplish was to engage in analysis and composition in different genres to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts to include public audiences. For our most recent assignment that we had to accomplish we did a public awareness campaign where we came out with topics and got assigned with other classmates that had similar topics. We had to come up with a campaign and do research on it . On my website there is a link you can click to learn more about the different lifestyles that people have. We also learned to communicate with our classmates in this project and be responsible with the things we were in charge of. Once we came up with our website we had to format it in a way that people would be interested to check it out. We had to publicly show this to our classmates and in a way we were able to improve our public speaking skills, and made sure we reached out to the CCNY community so they can be aware about different types of problems and get to the purpose we wanted to share.
To conclude, this class actually helped me a lot not only as a student but as a writer, I never really had any goal from the start when I started this class. But as it kept going on I started setting my mind to improve my writing to the very best I can. I have always wanted to get better at collecting evidence for my essays and then explaining them thoroughly which I have made some improvement and hope to keep getting. I think little by little I’m working on expressing myself but I still think I need a little more to go. This course will always make me reflect on my writing and will never forget about it. Thank you.