My Writing Journey

As I started my writing journey in this class, I was unsure about my writing techniques. I have always written for myself only, I was a writer for two eyes only, my eyes only. In phase one, while doing my first drafts of the Written Narrative Language, I had to change my main idea, as I never thought of writing as a way to tell something to someone. At this point I have always written for myself, mostly for a way of self reflection. Self reflection of something I have forgotten or something that just makes either happy or sad, something memorable. That can be seen during my Spoken Language Narrative project. The poem that I made was me reflecting on my own language. I made the poem to be presented in class, but I wrote it to think about where I was and how I got where I am.

“Thick iron bars in front of me, thousands of thousands of things keep happening

But I could only see, I could only feel, I could only hear

I couldn’t change anything

I had no power

I had no voice in me” (Gonzalez Allan, Voice)

I have achieved the course learning outcome through the semester “Recognizing the role of language in empowering, oppressing, and hierarchizing languages and their users, and being open to communicating across different languages and cultures.” Throughout the phase, I used different ways of expressing my language. WLLN I used a more casual language where I was telling a story and SLLN was written with language that could communicate the idea of a voice to the public or in this case my class. Moreover, a reading that stood out to me was “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan. In her writing I was able to understand even more about how language can indirectly affect a person, how it can be a tool of power and oppression in today’s world. 

A learning outcome which I feel I achieved partially was “Explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations.” I say partially, as I was exposed to several readings of abundant topics and genres scientific essays, poetry, short fiction, etc. However, I do not think I had the opportunity to analyze each one of them properly. The only time I believe I had the opportunity to truly analyze rhetorical situations was in my Rhetorical analysis essay, on the other hand, I still feel that more opportunities would have helped me to achieve this course learning outcome in a way that I feel comfortable about it. 

A learning outcome I did not achieve at all is “Explore biological concepts within rhetorical discourse.” I felt as already mentioned that I did not do enough work in analyzing rhetorical situations, not making me an expert on rhetorical analysis or understanding it all the time. It is hard for me to understand another’s author choices and I have stated the same in my Rhetorical Analysis cover letter. Other two course learning outcomes which I believe I did not achieve at all were “Recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in

writing situations.” and “Engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.” As I mentioned previously in my essay, I have written for myself mostly before starting this course, this makes it difficult for me to share my writing process with others, moreover using terms which I do not feel comfortable with or do not feel natural to me. 

During my three major assignments, Written Language Narrative, Rhetorical Analysis, Research Essay, a learning outcomes that I have practiced constantly were “Develop strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing” I did used comments from my classmates to revise my writings, to the point of drafting my essays at least three times before, although not all of my revising and editing were from classmates comments, some of their comments helped me to move my ideas to another direction that best suits my style. For example for my rhetorical analysis my fist draft was on analysis reading “Ghosts of the future” by Sarah Kaplan. But after receiving feedback from a classmate about how my writing style may affect how I perceive other people’s writing, I was led to make editions and finally delete my draft to start over with a reading (Amy Tan “The Tent” ) that was better for my writing style and that made it easier for me to start editing in a more efficient way. 

During my Rhetorical Analysis essay “ Compose texts that integrate your stance (i.e. you thesis) with appropriate sources using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation.” was the learning outcome that I achieved. While writing, I had to make sure I was writing around my thesis and not using citations which could have led my essay in the wrong direction for my analysis.

In my Research Essay I practiced and achieved two course learning outcomes being “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.” the one that stood the most. As I was looking for reliable information I encountered sources that even though they supported my main points, it was not reliable for using it as evidence. Another learning outcome that I achieved completely is

“Understand and use print and digital technologies to address a range of Audiences.” After finishing my research essay and reflecting on it, I realized how hard it would have been to explain my research so it can be understood by people who are new to my topic without using digital technology such as graphs. As I was writing I asked myself if what I was writing was going to be understood by all types of audiences. Therefore while editing I decided that using graphs instead of complicated explanations along side a bunch of numbers, was going to make it easier for me to communicate what I wanted to my audience.