Ashley Delgado Lopez

Sam Bellamy

FIQWS

December 10, 2020 

Throughout this semester, we have gone over various points that help us make our writing better. I was able to develop strategies that would help organize my thoughts and ideas when it came to a certain prompt that I had trouble with. With the help of peer reviews, I was able to define what was missing and what did not make sense in my writing pieces. Viewing other writing pieces helped me understand different perspectives other than mine. Having other people view my papers made me understand what my weaknesses in writing were. After that I was able to improve and be aware of those weaknesses. Different topics that were given by the professor helped me learn how to approach those topics in different manners. All of these achievements and understandings made me get more sense of what writing should be. Throughout the course, I have understood the rhetorical terms and achieved the course learning outcomes.

One of the weaknesses that I was able to approach and change was the organization of thoughts and ideas. This weakness was approached with the help of peer reviews. Everytime that we had a major writing assignment we would have a partner that would help with the criticism of the paper. That criticism could be for the better or for the worse. Personally, it was great for my paper. My peer told me that I needed to organize the paragraph structure and to not discuss more than one concept per paragraph because then it looked like I was jumping through my ideas. I took that criticism in and reread those parts and changed it so that it would make more sense. If I had different concepts in the paper, I would introduce them in the introduction but then discuss them separately in other paragraphs so that it would be more organized. This criticism did not only work for this paper but for many others. The things I learned in this course helped me bring them to my other courses as well. 

Writing a thesis was also something that I had to take into consideration. I always had trouble getting it right because sometimes it would be too wordy or not specific enough. So I had to find a “balance” between the two, I still have trouble getting a correct thesis but I have improved. When I have to write papers, the prompts are given by the professors, so there is a boundary and you have to focus on that one topic. That makes writing the thesis easier because the topic is given but it will also make it harder since now the professors are looking for something specific. I was able to resolve this by looking back at the feedback that the professors gave and also the feedback from the peer reviews. 

When it came to the Literacy Narrative, it was much simpler because we had to base that assignment on ourselves. We had to write about our connections or experience with English, writing, or language. I am bilingual so I found this topic to be easy to write about since I had a lot of struggles growing up. The ideas were there, but I still needed help with the structure of the essay. The essay had to flow and be clear, I had to explain the struggles and any experiences I had and how it affected me. But then I had to explain and go into detail about the results and how I overcame those struggles, doing this I also had to reconnect it back with the concept of English/Writing/Language. With the Literacy Narrative we did have to draft, revise, and do peer reviews. The peer reviews honestly help a lot because the structure of that essay was not what it was before. Before, many of my ideas were all over and there was no organized structure to the essay, but then with the peer review I was able to fix that. I reread what I had and managed to make the essay a better version of itself. 

In Exploratory Essay we had to present the information to the readers, we should not have had a stace in the essay, we just had to present the evidence and the analysis from the thesis that we formed. Personally, this essay helped me understand that there are different ways of writing a paper, I could not show bias in this paper because then it would look as if I am only supporting a side. Which was troubling because I enjoyed writing about the topic I chose. One of the things that struggled the most with this paper was the analyzing of the evidence, the analysis had to be good and well explained, so I had a bit of trouble doing that but in the end I was able to pass through it because I expanded on my thinking. 

Over all, with the different essays that we wrote, I was able to understand the different elements writing is composed of. Not only that but the development of different strategies when it comes to writing, I would approach the topics being given by the professor differently according to the topic. The process of writing a paper is also something that I have considered because of what I have been taught in this class. Papers need to have time dedicated for it to come to its best version, drafts need to be written and many revisions need to be made, also peer reviewing. But in the end, this course was able to make me understand the rhetorical terms and I was able to achieve the course learning outcomes.