A Chapter of Personal Growth

This FIQWS 10108 course has provided me with one of the best learning experiences I have ever had with writing. From personal narratives and journal responses to poems and researched analysis papers, there is now an assortment of writings that I can add to my portfolio and call my own. It was not an easy process however, and there were many personal hurdles along the way, but with the help of writing strategies that were taught and implemented in this course, I was able to produce many works of writing that I am proud of. Within this course, I learned to reinforce my drafting and revising skills by writing journal entries and exchanging peer reviews. This course also strengthened my analysis skills by teaching me how to employ appropriate rhetorical techniques. Lastly, FIQWS 10108 helped me practice and improve my ability to find research sources and cite them in my writing.

One of the hardest obstacles in writing for me was simply starting an essay. That is why, when assigned to write a literacy narrative, the first major assignment of the course, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to start my first draft. However, this difficulty to start writing was dramatically reduced as time progressed, and I wholeheartedly believe that it is due to the journal entries we would have to write each time the class met. Writing journal entries not only stimulated my ability to be creative and spontaneous, but it also encouraged me to pick up a pen and just start writing. Practicing the ability to write my immediate thoughts without worrying about structure or precision helped me when starting my rough drafts because it made me come to terms with the fact that one’s writing does not need to be perfect. In fact, rough drafts will most certainly be full of errors, which is why revising them is an essential part of writing. When it came to revision, a collaborative process was emphasized in this course. Therefore, the class  was divided into peer review groups where students would read their peers’ essays and give them feedback. Being able to revise essays this way was extremely beneficial because it gave me the opportunity to have various people look over my writing and tell me where there were weak spots in my essay. For example, on my Researched Critical Analysis rough draft, both of my peer review partners gave me feedback telling me to make my thesis statement more clear. After this, I made sure to clarify and strengthen my thesis statement which in turn improved the overall quality of my introduction.

Another way this FIQWS course helped me to improve my writing is by strengthening my analysis skills through the use of rhetorical strategies. For example, when I wrote my second discussion board response, I needed to identify the rhetorical terms employed in Jane Eyre, such as the strategies the author used to reinforce gender roles. Additionally, I needed to employ rhetorical strategies myself when writing the discussion board post. This included adjusting my tone in order to better persuade my audience, which were my professor and classmates, and convince them that Jane Eyre does indeed reinforce gender roles. Furthermore, providing direct quotes and examples from the text ensured that my discussion post contained ethos and logos, which provided me with credibility as a writer and added logic to my argumentation. This is similar to when I employed ethos, pathos, and logos in my counter argument when writing my Researched Critical Analysis. Including scientific information, logical reasoning, and emotion in my counter argument gave me the ability to persuade my audience into agreeing with my viewpoint.

Prior to writing my Researched Critical Analysis essay, this course provided me with a plethora of online resources to refer back to whenever I needed to locate sources or whenever I had questions about how to incorporate in-text citations. On two different visits to the library, I was able to learn about how to evaluate whether or not a source is credible in addition to learning about how to find academic sources via City College’s databases. On these days, the class discussed how to recognize bias in an article and how to determine what information from an article is useful. This organization of thoughts and ideas deriving from academic sources was put to practice with the Annotated Bibliography assignment. After reading Norton Chapter 15, which was posted by my professor on Blackboard, I learned how to summarize the main ideas of different articles and analyze how their information could be utilized in my Researched Critical Analysis. In other words, the Annotated Bibliography allowed to me assess how well my interpretation of each article was and determine if the article was able to strengthen my argument. On the other hand, in-text citations became just as important as locating sources when writing my critical analysis. After seeing videos during class about the importance of avoiding plagiarism and completing worksheets that helped me identify plagiarism, I gained a better understanding of why it is crucial for writers to credit other authors for their ideas. Any piece of information that is not common knowledge or any idea that is derived from another author must be cited, otherwise one’s paper will be unoriginal and, most importantly, guilty of plagiarism. In addition, my professor shared website resources for students to refer to, such as OWL Purdue guidelines and citation templates, which helped ease my confusion and quickly answered any questions that arose while creating citations in my researched critical analysis.

FIQWS 10108 helped me achieve all of the course learning outcomes presented in its syllabus because it allowed me to write in a variety of genres, implemented a collaborative approach to the drafting and revising process, and encouraged me to employ digital technologies to locate academic sources and create citations. The different genres I was assigned to write exercised my ability to manipulate different rhetorical strategies—such as tone and modes of persuasion—to better cater to the specific audience reading my essay. Additionally, this course’s ability to transform the drafting and revising aspects of writing into a completely collaborative and social process broadened my understanding of my own writing and taught me that improving writing takes more than just one person. Finally, the easily accessible digital resources that I was provided with made citing and locating sources easier, and gave me plenty of practice for when I need to cite sources in essays that I write in the future. Ultimately, the strategies and lessons I learned throughout this course made me a significantly better writer and intensified my desire to seek further change and improvement in my writing, especially now that I realize there is still so much to learn. I hope to carry everything I learned in this course with me for many years to come.

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