Fraylin Sanchez
English 21007
Professor Brown
05/22/2022
Becoming A Better Writer
I used to have a hard time writing essays, but now I can say that writing an essay is not as hard as it seems. Through this course I was able to become a better writer and learned how to communicate my intended message effectively to the intended audience. I was able to achieve all the 8 course learning objectives this class had to offer, and it is the reason I have become a better writer.
When it comes to achieving the course learning objectives, some were met more than others. For instance, I enhanced strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing and self-assessment to a large extent. The constant assignments we had to edit and revise our work greatly influenced this learning outcome. The rough drafts and outlines are examples of instances where these strategies had to be use which were followed by the final drafts after all changes had been made. The reflection we had to do at the end of each major assignment helped me evaluate myself on the work I did. Now editing, drafting, and revising my work has become a crucial step when writing a good paper. Acknowledging mine and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources and drawing on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility was somewhat met because I had to use the experimental result from a video in order to do my lab report and I had to use the information they provided even if I disagreed to make a well written report. Negotiating my own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation was another learning objective that was met to a certain point. During the proposal part of this class, I had to negotiate with my group members a topic to do our proposal on, and what information to use and rhetorical devices based on what was needed to convince our audience.
I did a good job of developing and engaging in the social and collaborative aspects of writing processes. In class we were given the opportunity to revise and collaborate on our classmates’ papers and that helped me improve the way I read and analyze documents. I was able to provide feedback to them, which they used to improve their writings. By doing peer reviews of each other’s essays, I have learned to collaborate on my peers’ work, and make my paper better by giving them feedback which can also help me get a better understanding of what I’m missing. I also was able to achieve the learning objective of “Engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond”. This was done by creating different papers which varied by genre. For example, there were lab reports, technical descriptions, and proposals which had to be made for this class. The course learning object “formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing” was achieved while doing the lab report. For the lab report I had to pick a stance for my hypothesis and then formulate and articulate it during this report. I had to show evidence and explain the results of this experiment.
Furthermore, I accomplished “practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects”. I used various websites to find sources to help me create and show evidence for some of the papers that were done in this class. For example, for the technical description I had to use information from the component manufacturer to explain its components and how they work, also I had to use it to show pictures which shows the parts of the item. For the proposal I also had to use online databases to find evidence and information that was useful for the proposal such as the budget and information about some places where this has been tested. I was able to locate academic journal articles and evaluated them for their credibility, accuracy, timeliness, and bias. I also did the same when looking for sources on the Internet that related to my topic. I was also able to strengthen my source use by citing the sources from the online database into my lab report, technical description, and proposal. In the Technical Description and Proposal papers I used IEEE formatting to acknowledge the sources I used while creating these papers. I created a works cited / reference page and used IEEE citation within my body paragraphs. Lastly, I was also able to achieve the course learning outcome “strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources)”. In this class I incorporated strategies when using my sources like paraphrasing and summarizing. In some parts of my papers instead of simply pasting the quote, I instead was able to take out the major and most important part making the information simpler to present and using simpler language. I strengthened my source citing skills by using multiple sources through the course of this class and making sure I properly cited them. I also analyze these sources to explain how they help the topic or theme I was trying to explain and not simply pasting them without any context. By using these strategies, I was able to integrate my stance in my assignments in an effective way that made its argument more credible and accurate.
In conclusion, as previously stated, I was able to achieve all the course learning outcomes from this class. I achieved them little by little as the class developed, and by the end of the course I was able to achieve all of them. These learning outcomes have helped me become a better writer and I will continue to use them for the rest of my academic life as a future engineer to write concreate and understandable papers which can carry my message through.
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