WELCOME TO MY PAGE

ENJOY READING ALL MY WORK FROM THROUGHOUT

THE FALL SEMESTER OF MY FIWQS COMPOSITION CLASS

This would have to be about the third assignment where we have to write about ourselves and it has gotten easier. From the first personal narrative essays to the little self assessment for each essay, I am truly proud of my improvement. This self-assignment is supposed to show me and others not only all my works throughout the semester but also that I have gained a deeper understanding of each topic introduced as well as enhanced skills such as engaging the audience, and stating my purpose clearly. The writings included are the personal narrative essay, exploratory essay, research critical analysis essay and also all of the comments/peer reviews. 

When I first started my personal narrative essay for my composition class, I had a lot of trouble from arranging my ideas to even picking a topic. I honestly wanted to get done with this essay so I was not actually paying attention to the details of my work. Later on, I found out that as I was writing, I was going nowhere. I figured out I needed to start from scratch, and I was willing to take that challenge. Picking a topic was the hardest thing for me, because this essay is supposed to be about our personal life’s and there are certain things I did not want to talk about. I eventually started to write about the people I go through with things everyday and that is my family. I knew that writing about them was going to make my essay more interesting and I had a lot of ideas surrounding it. In order to gather my thoughts, I first had to remember and jot down at least most of my experiences with my parents’ that impacted on my education. I used those notes and built on my them when writing my essay which made writing so much easier. When writing this narrative, I learned that I need to continue writing down my thoughts before I put the pen to paper. I also learned that I have an issue with not breaking up my paragraphs, instead I had long paragraphs with multiple ideas. With the help of my peer review groups and Professor St.John, I was able to figure out where I wanted to start. I really liked this topic assignment and felt as if I did good on my final essay.

The next essay was the exploratory essay which was the most troubling for me. I felt as if I was not fully understanding the meaning of an exploratory essay which really threw me off. During this essay one of my weaknesses kept appearing, I knew what to say but I did not know how to write it. Throughout my academic writing I realized that I sometimes have an issue with how to expand my words or how to introduce topics. When writing my exploratory essay this issue came up a lot. The purpose of this essay was to analyze two different types of discourse communities that talk about the same thing (scholarly and public) and show how each article engages with the audience very differently. We had to look into how the authors speak instead of what they actually say. One of the comments that I received on my essay from Professor St.John was, “explain how you’ll be analyzing that stuff; then in the body of the discussion, use that mode of analysis to discuss the ways the articles deal with the subject”. When Professor St.John made this comment, I had a better idea of how to structure my essay. I was originally writing essentially summaries of the two articles on Affirmative Action but then after reviewing my peer review comments as well, I finally was able to compare each article correctly. In the paper, I talked about how the popular article of Affirmative Action had pictures and shorter paragraphs. I also explained how it had a lot of advertisements because it is how they make money and are kept running. The scholarly article that I found was about 6 pages long, which was to be expected. It also took what the popular article said into depth. The exploratory essay tested my writing skills and I am glad that we were assigned this essay. Even though I got a B, I was able to see the transition my transition as a writer from the personal narrative essay to the exploratory essay.

The final essay is the research critical analysis essay which was an argumentative essay about a social issue in our society. This essay had us choosing an anthropological topic and discussing its views, arguing a position, acknowledging other sides and also refuting. I found this essay to be a combination of the two essays that we previously wrote because we had to choose a topic that was interesting to us and had to put our own twist/ideas in it like our personal narrative but we also had to compare the different communities within the topic like the exploratory essay. This essay was one of my favorites because I’ve written research paper essay all 4 years in high school so it was not too hard to figure out what I wanted to write. My topic was reverse racism because I feel as if recently, I’ve seen in our society a lot of racist acts towards african Americans that were not being addressed. In order to prepare for this essay, we had to write an annotated bibliography, position statement, and one draft. For my annotated bibliography, my position statement was, “Even with the significant progress throughout the years regarding what is believed about racism towards African Americans, there is still a substantial amount of ignorance surrounding the topic. Many individuals believe that the term, racism can be associated with white individuals when it cannot because reverse racism does not exist”. My original thesis statement was somewhat similar but I remember, Professor Nieves telling me what it was not specific enough. I wrote before that “there is still a substantial amount of ignorance about racism” and he commented, racist towards what? He asked is towards society or? I then had to fix it because I wanted my essay to be only about the african american and white communities only. I talked about how racism does not apply to white people because they were never oppressed and have the most power. I also based my other arguments of of this as well. During this essay my only issue was trying to figure out different arguments without being repetitive. The topic itself is not talked about a lot so there was such a limited amount of resources that I found to help back up my positions. This essay was the longest spent out of all 3, but it was good to see all my work tied into one final piece of work.

Discourse communities, engagement, audience, genre, and purpose are all terms that I focused throughout this whole semester. The transition from highschool to college writing was not the easiest but it was a good journey. When writing this self-assessment, I mentioned that writing about myself was difficult in the personal narrative essay but in doing so, for this essay it was not. Learning and using different resources such as the city college database, writing center, JSTOR and even easy bib made writing all my essay easier to do. My development as a writer has improved a lot because of the techniques that I have been taught during this course.