Luis Gutierrez
Professor Velez
FIQWS
10 December 2021
Phase 4: Self Assessment
Throughout my college career. I have written a good amount of pages through the papers that were assigned. As a Freshman in College, coming in from Highschool, I expected to be assigned papers that were much more complex and over 20 pages. However, that wasn’t necessarily the case. The papers we were assigned were ones that were quite challenging and abit tedious, however, they were papers that displayed many messages that were quite insightful. If there is one thing that all these papers have in common, it is that they all show some sort of growth in my writing. From the first phase paper to this paper. I’ve noticed that many things have changed in my writing. However, my overall writing style and language hasn’t necessarily changed much except for my vocabulary being much more flexible. In general, the way that I structure my writing and connect ideas is something that developed quite a lot in general. To answer the question thoroughly, I believe that I have indeed achieved the course learning outcomes throughout the multiple papers that we have written. I feel my biggest development came from citing evidence and overall explaining the evidence. This was shown heavily in my papers as from the Phase 1 – 2 papers, I didn’t necessarily know how to cite evidence correctly however, in my 3rd paper, I was shown to gain a basic understanding of it.
The idea of citing evidence in MLA format was something I was completely inexperienced with. It was something I didn’t really learn in my High school. I can safely say that it was my weak point when entering college. I found it quite awkward to do since I didn’t need to do it when writing my past essays in High School. I find it kind-of disappointing that my highschool didn’t teach us that. Highschool is meant to prepare you for college and one of the most important things you idolize when writing papers in college isn’t taught in highschool. I feel this contributed to me being somewhat weak when it came to MLA Evidence Citation. However, this allowed me to grow as a writer as I learned how to cite evidence much better. This really connects with the seventh course learning outcome in which I learned how to utilize research sources, especially the City College Database. This is clearly shown in my 3rd Paper. I can safely say that my third paper may possibly be my strongest paper in terms of meeting the course learning outcomes since for my Phase 3 paper, the topic was something that allowed me to take a somewhat argumentative take on the idea that I was explaining. It was a mix of informative and argumentative. I explained my stance on the idea of Standard vs Black English, which connects with the 8th course learning outcome in which I used argumentation and summary to integrate multiple ideas to create my whole argument.
Something consistent throughout my papers was my ability to target a certain audience. I am able to keep a certain language throughout the whole paper to engage my targeted audience and somewhat relate to the audience that I aim to capture with my paper. Whether I am trying to inform my audience or to empathize with my audience, I believe that I am able to do that successfully. This specifically goes with the 6th learning outcome of the course, in which I can utilize multiple forms of language in order to connect with the audiences that I am aiming for. I can safely say that understanding the audience you want to relate to in your essay is one of the most important things when it comes to writing the papers since if you can’t visualize the audience you want to aim for, your essay will be all over the place language wise. I believe this helped intensely with writing all of the papers in general. However, it isn’t something that I can say improved throughout all my papers. I feel it’s something that isn’t really something that you can more or less further develop but something that you can just do and get good at. I feel as if the Phase 3 paper heavily emphasized on the idea of having to persuade your audience members, at least when it came to my paper in particular. I felt as if I was focusing on persuading my audience members to side with me on the idea that Black English is heavily suppressed. The other two papers didn’t really head into this type of direction and were more heavily based on the informative side of things. I feel this has to do with the 2nd course learning outcome in which the 3rd phase paper focused more on rhetoric forms of writing. It wasn’t just in my writing but in the pieces of media that I referenced as they all had a sense of rhetoric especially when describing the difference between Black and White English. This also heavily connects with the fourth course learning outcome as throughout the course, from phase 1 to 3, I practiced and recognized multiple rhetorical terms and used some rhetorical strategies. I believe that I also recognized the role of language attitudes in empowering, oppressing, and hierarchizing languages and their users thanks to the readings that we dove into in the beginning and the middle of the course. Learning about the impact on the mental health of minorities when the way they speak is being questioned or told is wrong goes with the first course learning objective.
Finally, one of the things that I believe helped develop exponentially with my writing was the ability to communicate with my professors and gain understanding on certain aspects of the papers to better understand them. This specifically aims at the 5th learning outcome of this course in which I took advantage of the social aspect of the writing process by getting feedback and building on that feedback as well. This is how I learned about how to use MLA format and better develop my papers. This, in turn, paved the way for the editing and revising process of the papers, the third learning outcome, in which it helped develop strategies for making my papers much better in general. And this leads onto the ninth and final learning outcome, practicing systematic application of citation conventions. With the citations I’ve used, I feel that with how I applied these sorts of citations in my papers had also developed with practice.
To Conclude, the course has helped fully with how I developed as a writer from the first phase to the last phase. I learned many things about writing papers and how to explore different ways of explaining evidence and crediting evidence along with writing in different ways. I can say that all the course learning outcomes have been met for me personally and the more papers I do in the future, the easier they’ll all get easier to meet.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
