This semester in my first year of college has offered me a bigger improvement on creating and reviewing my skills in critical thinking and writing. This English course has sharpened my way of writing and creating my narrative, as well as my ability to analyze bodies of literature and reading from many famous texts. There were three phases during the courses that we practiced that helped us strengthen our writing skills that set different goals that made each phase unique to its own benefit. These three phases involved the Written Language and Literacy Narrative, The Rhetorical Analysis, and The Research Paper, as well as weekly readings and discussion posts to help keep us on our feet with reading and breaking down the story’s theme and hidden messages and expressing our own opinions on the readings. While all these writing assignments held their own different respective goals to accomplish, they share one common purpose in the long run, and that is to connect them all together to review feedback and analyze your work and how you progressed as a writer. This will be the goal for creating a self assessment essay, to view my progress in my English writing course and identify where I improved and what I still need to work on.
The beginning phase was the Written language and Literacy Narrative was one essay assignment I felt I had more connection with because of its prompt, which was to find one moment of your life that deals with language and literacy. As I was brainstorming ideas to write about for this essay, I realized that I could further elaborate on this goal by expanding my answer into not one but three different moments that I could write about in this essay. I would write about the different physical forms one can use to express their thoughts and uncover who they are as a person by doing activities such as painting, drawing, writing, or even playing an instrument. I went even further by adding images of my own examples such as my journal, my Van Gough painting, and my guitar. I shared my personal experience and gave different stories to the different techniques I wrote about to further connect to an audience. After completing this essay, I reviewed the feedback and examined how well I did for this essay. What I could work on is removing any unnecessary words to keep the essay pure, as well as forgetting to add commas to separate independent clauses. What I worked well on was finding a connection between all three moments I wrote about to a bigger picture to finding out who you really are, as well as self expression my topic to become more transparent.
The second phase involved choosing one of the assigned readings to cover based on the author’s writing style, as well as their agenda and aim towards the audience. My Rhetorical Analysis essay was based off of Amy Tan’s “ Mother Tongue” short story. This short story revolves around an asian american author, who writes about her childhood experiences with her mother, dealing with her abilities to speak english. In my Rhetorical Analysis essay, I wrote about two different themes that Amy Tan directly and indirectly mentions in order to push her narrative towards the audience. Her short story talks about how a person’s speaking and thinking skills can be influenced based on the relationships they have with friends and family, and she also covers the topic of immigrants being exploited for their disadvantage of not being able to speak the same language as another in the U.S. Her audience would target children to immigrant parents and students. As for my feedback for writing this essay, I needed to work on creating more paragraph breaks and fixing my grammatical errors. What I did well on was giving a fresh perspective on the significance of Amy Tan and her story, as well as adding details for the rhetorical context.
The final phase of the course was one that took more effort and time to research for this assignment, and that would be the Research Paper. This phase involved picking a topic that could connect to language and english or pick any topic of my choosing. I decided to write about Bilingualism and how it can shape the way young people can understand and speak two languages at an early age, as well as the benefits that come behind it to learning a second or third language. For this essay, I added evidence, images, quotes, and my own interpretations to the subject. I chose a variety or .org and .edu sources to help reinforce my claim and broke it down in simpler terms to simplify the explanations. To summarize, learning a second language can help improve cognitive thinking, increase intelligence, and make you more open to discovering and acknowledging new cultures and backgrounds behind learning a new language, as well as adding business and financial benefits to a working company that is looking to expand and find financial success. As for my feedback, what I need to work on is adding in-text citations and paying attention to the font I use for my writing style, and as for improvements, I did great in using reliable sources, structured my argument correctly, and outlined my essay to add my claim, evidence, and my own breakdown of the evidence.
As for the discussion posts, although there were over a handful of discussions and readings we were assigned, there were three that I thought caught my attention the most. “ Mother Tongue “, “ The Voice of a storyteller “, and “ Only Daughter” were the main three discussions that I could find myself relating to the most. In my discussion posts for these three posts, I discussed how these stories use the strategies of storytelling and using their childhood experiences as a way to connect to their audience is their method to directly inform the audience into finding a moment one can use to reflect on.
These phases of the English course have helped me view my work and see my progression on how far I have come to being a better writer. These different assignments offer different distinct goals on how to improve your thinking skills and how you can adapt by adding personal stories and experiences to better connect to an audience based on the agenda you are reaching. What we might not realize is that our skills will continue to develop as time goes on, whether we write on a piece of paper, taking notes from a book, thinking while in class, or drawing what is on our minds, and that is what helps create a stepping stone to being a better writer.
