Final Self Reflection

Sungin Bhuiyan

Professor Oliver St John

FIQWIS 10103

December 13, 2019

Self Reflection

Throughout this course, I have seen myself grow as a writer. At the beginning of this course, I was not a very strong writer. I constantly had issues to fully understand the tasks assigned and struggled with expressing my ideas clearly. I was not familiar with most of the assignments because I had never worked on such assignments before. However, I find myself to be a stronger writer now because of the assignments because those assignments helped me get out of my comfort zone and explore new writing and reading strategies. 

The literacy narrative was the first paper that I wrote for this class. I found the literacy narrative a challenging essay to write. Firstly because I have never written anything like a literacy narrative before. I am so used to analyzing other people’s works and articles that when I was assigned a task where I had to analyze and describe my relationship and challenges with reading and writing, I was overwhelmed. Even though we were given instructions, I still was not clear about what exactly I was required to write about. In my first draft of my essay, I barely talked about my own experiences with reading and writing throughout the essay and mostly focused on analyzing two of the texts that were made available to us. After I sent the rough draft of my essay to my group members, all of their feedback had one thing in common, that I should talk less about the other two articles and talk more about my own journey with reading and writing, since that is what the task is. That was also the same thing that my professor advised me to do after he read my rough draft, to avoid talking so much about the other authors and their experiences and focus more on my own experiences. I definitely found it challenging to incorporate my own narrative in the essay because as I mentioned before, I am not used to this particular style of writing because I have never written a paper on what type of a reader and writer I am. After I read my peers’ and my professor’s feedback, I edited my paper and deleted some parts where I was talking too much about the other authors and incorporated my “story” into it. Overall, although I struggled a little I think I did a decent job of writing a literacy narrative. My peers’ feedback helped me make some changes for the final draft which I think were crucial. Even though it was challenging, I believe that challenging assignments like this one are what will help me grow as a reader and a writer. 

The most challenging assignment for this class for me was the exploratory essay, it was really open-ended. I found the prompt confusing. In addition to that, I had never written anything like that before. I am used to analyzing documents, but not types of articles. This was also the first time I read a scholarly journal. I picked the topic “Abortion in the Middle East” because its a topic that I was interested to read about. The scholarly article that I picked was “Abortion in Islam: Policies and Practice in the Middle East and North Africa” and the popular article that I picked was “Framing the Abortion Picture in the Arab World”. In this paper, I struggled with discussing how the scholarly journal was different from the popular article. I discussed a number of rhetorical devices, such as diction, syntax, repetition, and details. I noticed that the first article had a lot of facts, data, and statistics, whereas the second article was focused on just getting the point across. I chose to rewrite this essay for a higher grade based on the feedback that I received from my professor. In the first draft, I did not mention the audience that the articles were meant for. In my revision, I discussed how the first article is meant for more of a scholarly audience who might be conducting their own research, whereas the second article is addressed towards more of a general audience. Although I found this assignment challenging, I believe it helped me as a writer because it required me to get out of my comfort zone and explore different types of articles, and that is something that I had not done prior to this assignment.   

Another assignment that we were assigned was the research critical analysis essay. Even though this assignment was lengthy, I found it easier than the other essays. I have done research essays before, but the research for this assignment was more advanced because I had to include scholarly journals and a very in-depth analysis of the topic. I picked the topic of abortion. For my first draft, I discussed why abortion should be legal throughout the United States. I listed and discussed many reasons and advantages of abortion, of how it can help a woman and a society in whole. However since this is a very broad topic, I decided to change my topic and focus on one element and write about specifically how abortion can reduce crime rates. For this essay, I had to do a lot of research, I included several scholarly journals as my resources. I also read a number of scholarly journals that had been reviewed by other scholars. I did a lot of in-depth research for this essay, and I had not done much research prior to this course. I think this assignment helped me understand how to do research more effectively, for I navigated the college library’s website several times, as well as other academic websites and journals to find the most appropriate resources for this essay. 

I believe at the beginning of this course I was not a very strong writer. There are many aspects to writing a good paper. I did not know much about genres, and how it can change the way a paper is presented. In this course, we have written three different essays, the literacy narrative, the exploratory essay, and the research essay. All these essays had different genres, different purposes, and could be written for a different set of audiences. For example, the purpose of the literacy narrative was to tell a story about my journey as a writer and a reader, the purpose of the exploratory essay was to examine someone else’s work, specifically, differentiate between an academic journal and a popular magazine or a news article that was written about a similar topic, and the purpose of the research essay was to conduct an in-depth research about a topic that I was interested in. In addition to that, while I was reading different articles while doing my research, I was thinking about the audience that these articles were meant for. Despite these essays, one other component of this course that helped me was the peer-group reviews. In the peer group reviews, we would send the drafts of our essays to other group members and we would read and provide feedback on it. I think this really helped me because it gave me an insight into how my essay was received by a different set of audiences. The feedback helped me change certain things and write a better essay. This class required us to use a lot of digital technology. Most of the stuff was done online, we submitted everything online, including the essays and the peer reviews. We also designed a portfolio, which was a little confusing at first but interesting. 

This course was a very informative course, which challenged me several times and pushed me to get out of my comfort zone, which I think made me become a better writer. It introduced me to several new writing strategies and made me realize that when I am writing a paper I should be thinking about several aspects, such as the purpose, the audience, the genre, and rhetorical strategies. I read several articles throughout the course keeping those aspects in mind, which made the articles more interesting and exciting. Overall I believe that this was a very exciting course and it helped me achieve my goals to become a stronger writer. 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/11nMgg-LZ4Mh_uRcoYyY3SvOi8CjuQ3i9VXnUezXjp2A/edit