Self-Assessment Essay
Throughout my school career, many of my classmates and friends have always said similar things when it came to English class “I love writing” or “English class is so easy.” I have never once said those words since English is my second language I never really liked writing or reading much, I was more a numbers type of person and excelled at STEM subjects. However, throughout this course, I have found a deeper connection to it because of the not-so-strict creative writing that happened throughout this semester. Most of the writing pieces written here were to be written, but you wanted them to be read and what kind of tone you wanted to use. Even though there were no restrictions on the sort of writing, we needed to achieve some learning objectives. The first of these course objectives that I was introduced to was, “Examine how attitudes towards linguistic standards empower and oppress language users.” This was the first learning outcome that we were introduced to thanks to our very first assignment “What is writing” It helped me understand the many diverse types of dialects and how many can communicate with one another without having to be grammatically correct or even must speak in the same dialect.
As the course continued, we were introduced to our first phase course during this phase we would contain three writing and we would have to pick one, I choose Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue,” and describe what kinds of tools they used to grab in the reader and make their writing relatable or trustworthy. This was when we were introduced to three Rhetoric strategies that authors would use the first being Logos, in this method they would connect to readers with the use of reason and playing to the audience’s reason and logical arguments. The second method is called Pathos in which we learned the author used the ability to connect to their audience through their emotions and say things the audience would be easily related to. The last method we learned was Ethos. This is used by authors who wish to grab their audience through credibility, status, and/or authority. I would later proceed to draft an essay on these different strategies including her use of tone and use of connecting emotionally with her audience. Throughout many edits and many peer reviews, I was able to produce a presentable essay that I believe was one of the best pieces of work that was produced by myself throughout phase one which I was able to, “Examine how attitudes towards linguistic standards empower and oppress language users.” I was able to learn this because of my deep analysis of Amy Tan’s writing and her storytelling of something she went through in her life.
Moving on through the course we began Phase 2, the main assignment of this phase was an argumentative essay using many different skills which I will describe now. The first skill was finding scholarly sources and finding valuable and credible information that could support our statements and make our essays information-based rather than opinionated. However, it was not enough to just research the topic and say, “Hey I was right!” You had to provide credit and be able to quote properly the information that you were getting from outside sources. This is why I was able to learn the course learning outcome of, “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.” and, “Practice systematic application of citation conventions.” This was because I was able to accurately find reliable information and give credit where credit is due. Also, we learned how to make a works cited page in which we included a page detailing exactly where we got our information from and making sure to give credit to the authors for allowing us to have and use their information. Lastly, we learned about rebuttals and how to strengthen our argument by acknowledging that other argument and being able to say “Yes, but my argument is better because of so and so.”
Moving along Phase 2 we started dwelling deeper into Phase 3 in which we had to create a multimedia assignment that touched on any other worldly topic of our choosing. I choose to continue on with the theme of this course and speak about the many different dialects and how being different is not wrong, but not being true to yourself is. Throughout the editing and proofreading when it came to the actual texts of the multimedia assignment, I was fully able to grasp the next course learning, “engaged in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond.” This was because I had to really ley on just pictures and hidden meanings to try and convey a message without really talking about the topic. So, when it came down to the wire a lot of things needed to be changed and certainly replaced, but I was able to grasp the idea of providing information without giving a fully detailed essay about said topic.
Lastly, but certainly not least I think the main takeout away from this course was our final learning outcome, “engaged in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond.” This is due to the many hours that were spent editing and revising both our peers’ work and our work. I think this was a successful course in which I was able to learn many new techniques, ideas, and ways to think about how I can really get this message out to my audience. I guess I’m using these things even while writing this!
