Jefferson Veliz

Professor Mark Jamison

FIQWS 10108

12/19/2018

Steps How I Became a Better Writing- Self-Assessment

Before coming to City College, I was scared because my writing skills were not the best. To begin with, I have struggled a lot this semester, which I had experience failure, but it turned me into a better student. As many people say “failure is the key to success” this quote has impacted my life in adapting to college because life is all about failures, which then become lessons. As a writer, I have developed tremendous writing and communication skills because of the amount of feedback I received and the three days visits to the writing center per week. Additionally, receiving writing tips from drafting and revising to rhetorical situations helped me feel comfortable with writing. One of the reasons my writing has improved this semester is because of the rhetorical situations. The six rhetorical situations are purpose, genre, stance, exigence, audience, and media/design. Applying the rhetorical situations to every essay I had done, has impacted my essay to go from a normal essay to a better written essay.

At the beginning of the semester, I wrote the Lifeview and Workview essay without thinking about the importance of rhetorical situations. I consider this essay as the best one from all the other options. After getting feedback from my professor, I became conscious that my essay was disorganize without guiding the audience. In my revision, I focused on trying to guide the audience throughout my essay by having a clear thesis and always connecting back to the main idea.  Besides the audience, other rhetorical situations played a role in my writing, such as purpose, stance, genre, media and exigence. Thinking about the purpose of this assignment was encouraging because I would ask myself “what is the reason I want to write about this topic?”. After thinking about the purpose, the writing process became more interesting to be able to inform readers and express my views about my  Lifeview and Workview. Also, to perceive a better understanding of building a compass because it is an important aspect of designing my life. Genre can be seen in this assignment because the LifeView and Workview was more like a personal essay than other types of writing. I never had an essay related to this topic, so exigence was crucial in the process because I felt motivated to try and write about something new. It was intriguing and stressful because I had to express my perspective in some topics, which I do not really like to talk about that frequently. Additionally, this is where stance played a role in my writing when I stated my viewpoints on Lifeview and Workview. At last, media did not play that much of a role in my writing, but it was seemed in the Cuny’s academic commons for the portfolio.

From the beginning of class to now, I learned new writing tips to become a better writer. Referring to the Course learning outcome, I am conscious I met most of them throughout the class. One of the CLO, I encountered frequently was developing strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing. For the Research Critical Analysis and LifeView and Workview essay, I created outlines to organize my essay using the “TEA” method. This was helpful because once I finished the outline, all I had to do was transfer my assignment to a draft. Then, I would go to the writing center at least twice for revision. Also, I explored different types of rhetorical situations and practiced different types of rethorical situation, such as the purpose, genre, exigence, media/design, stance, and audience. I practiced rethorical situations in all of my essay, which improved my assignments. For example, the summary responses, RCA, and Lifeview and Workview essays. I practiced systematic convection of citation convention in different situations. Firstly, MLA format in the lifeview and workview essay. Secondly, APA format in the Research Critical Analysis essay. At last, I located online sources that were credible, but not bias. This can be seemed, when I did research for the Research Critical Analysis about careers choices. Additionally, it can be seen in the Lifeview and Workview essay when I researched sources that would support my perspectives and oppose them                                                       My writing has developed in many ways. I am a second English Learner, so I find normal to find punctuations or grammar mistakes. However, I am not a person that likes to keep making the same mistakes especially in college. As many people say that practice makes perfect, I disagree in some way because I think practice makes better, not perfect. One way my writing has improved is by going to the writing center three times per week to revise my essays, but also to practice on the things I struggled. After receiving feedback from my professor, I always used to think thoughtfully about ways to overcome that challenge. One of the things I needed to improve was expressing my ideas better and transitioning to make my essay smoother. During this semester, I watched videos on YouTube, and even read online articles on ways to improve my writing. Comparing my essays from the start of semester and the end of the semester, I see improvement in transitioning, grammar, punctuating, and being able to express my ideas clearly.

In conclusion, this class has helped me gain confidence in my writing. I feel more comfortable writing papers than at the beginning of the semester. I noticed the improvement that rhetorical situations played in my assignments by going back to my previous assignments. Thus, the rhetorical situations have been a life saver throughout this semester, so I am thankful I learned about them this semester.