Self Assessment Essay

My Time in English Composition

Throughout my time in English Composition, I believe that I have achieved the majority of our course learning objectives. While completing the four major essays, I improved on my writing and analysis skills, along with my collaborative work skills. Each phase helped me achieve a new goal in terms of improving my writing.

 

Our work with Amy Tan’s text, Mother Tongue has helped mainly with the first one (Recognize the role of language attitudes and standards in empowering, oppressing, and hierarchizing languages and their users, and being open to communicating across different languages and cultures.) With Mother Tongue being based on experiences with language discrimination and race struggles, our analysis of it has led to my growth of understanding on the topic. Specifically, how language barriers impact people. Our first assignment, the WLLN, and its connection to Amy Tan helped me actually think about what I learned and how it impacted me. While my speech isn’t specifically about language issues, Amy Tan’s text taught me how to write based on personal experiences and i also got to hear the experiences of my peers (related to language struggles)

 

The second course objective, (Explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations.) is something I believe that I can still build on. The majority of works we focused on in this class were personal narratives/speeches, all supported by evidence mainly based on personal experience. Each text had mostly the same format/used similar rhetorical strategies. While there was great meaning in all the texts, I still believe that there was a lack of variety in them, leading me to believe this objective is something I can work on.

 

All three phases assisted me in the third learning objective which was to develop strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing. Each phase we had our major assignment and during the process of its completion we learned new strategies to write and revise. First, with the multiple drafting steps and then we began our peer review process, and most recently we began discussing revision strategies. Splitting the process of writing our essay into steps helped a lot and the revision processes we went through made this goal achievable.

 

Our work in phase two during our rhetorical strategy essay, helped me most with achieving course objective four (Recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations.) The discussion we had in class on ethos, pathos and logos taught me alot about rhetorical terms and how to use them. We went through each term, discussing its meaning and using examples, so when I went to write my own rhetorical analysis essay, I had a great understanding of all the different strategies.

 

We did a lot of peer reviewing throughout this course and I believe that helped with achieving the fifth course objective. Engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes. Learning to give and receive constructive criticism is part of the collaborative process of writing and that’s something we worked on a lot. The sharing of ideas we did in class also helped a lot. Hearing others’ opinions and perspectives can be translated into writing ideas and that’s a very important part of the collaborative side of writing.

 

Course objective 6, Understanding and using print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences is something we are working on through our use of the WordPress Site. Transferring all our work to a website of our own creation will help alot with spreading its access and obtainability.

 

Phase 3 helped me achieve course objectives seven, locate research sources (including academic journal articles, magazine and newspaper articles) in the library’s databases or archives and on the Internet and evaluate them for credibility, accuracy, timeliness, and bias. Learning how to research and locate sources properly was very important for this phase. I also learned how to read through long sources, and search for the most relevant information. Even though I already knew about the topic I chose, I found myself learning so much more through my research for this essay, because I was taught and given the resources to do extensive research.

 

Course objective eight (Compose texts that integrate your stance with appropriate sources using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation.) was achieved through phase 3 and our research essay. Being able to choose our own topic, and present information on it, also in a way of our choosing, played a part in building on this skill. For my research essay I chose to discuss social issues and making an educated stance with a topic like that is extremely important. Through research and rhetorical strategy i believe that I was able to appropriately voice my ideas on the topic as well as analyze the ideas of others.

 

Course objective nine (Practice systematic application of citation conventions.)  was also focused on during phase 3. We did a lot of work with citation during this phase. We learned a lot about how to correlate cite sources, and the different formats that exist. We also received many resources for citation use.

Overall, my time in English Composition has greatly improved my writing skills. I am now more skilled on incorporating rhetoric into my writing and know how to appeal to specific audiences. I feel that I have been able to meet most of the course learning objectives and even learn more than what is listed in them.