Self-Assessment Essay

Throughout this semester, I feel like this class definitely challenged me and my process of writing. Personally, I do not necessarily like writing or enjoy the writing process, but I found the class’s set of prompts interesting and somewhat enjoyable. I feel as if I struggle a lot in formulating a strong stance and defending my argument in a coherent way. I would often re-read my own draft work and be unsatisfied with my analysis or my use of words. Most of the time while writing drafts for the major essays in this class, I would spend a lot of time just struggling to word things in a certain way or just to gain more depth in some surface-level observations and analysis.

The drafting process itself is something entirely new to me when it comes to writing, so that could play a role in why everything I want to say is so hard to form in a draft. Usually, what I would do for essays, and honestly what I prefer to do, is to sit down and finish the essay entirely in one sitting. However, I believe the approach to drafts presented in this class as an intermediate step to gain critiques from my peers and Professor Harris greatly impacted my essays. It was kind of like a step back from minor details and trying to look at the whole picture and just having fresh eyes on a paper is very helpful too. Honestly, if we did not have to write drafts, I do not think I would see the success I made in some of my essays this semester. Thus, already in the drafting process, I gained experience with “enhancing strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment” through struggling with the drafting process and “developing and engaging in the collaborative and social aspects of writing” through the peer-review process. I still hate writing drafts, but I think it is a valuable lesson that a good essay takes many iterations and versions, and struggling with an essay is no more than pushing yourself to create the best thing you can.

In the development of my first essay, I think I experienced the most growth because of the transition from my draft to my final essay. With the submission of my first draft, I felt that my thoughts were all over the place, leading to bad organization and giving the paper a ramble-like quality in my opinion. I feel like Professor Harris’ critique sums up my work, “You are presenting too many ideas at once. Slow down. Be specific with how your informant’s cultural background influences their viewpoint on the issue. Each of your body paragraphs should then focus on some moment in the interview that illuminates an answer to that question.” In response to the critique, I took some time to organize my thoughts and set some goals for my final draft. I think that just sitting down and concentrating on working towards goals that I set in relation to the peer review and feedback from Professor Harris guided me to the final product. I plan on incorporating this process of setting goals from opportunities for improvement in my writing process with future papers. In relation to the Course Learning Outcomes, I think the most important one I learned through the process of writing this essay is “acknowledging your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility”. In the peer review, one of the more notable papers I read was Emily’s. This is because her use of language in narrating the interview with her informant gave the paper a very storytelling-like quality that made me feel as if I was witnessing the interview play out in front of me. This style definitely contrasted my analytical approach to the paper, and I tended to use a more analytical style of writing throughout all the assignments. I feel as if there was not a right or wrong approach to this assignment or any assignment, but each different approach in the use of language offers a wide range of advantages depending on the impact the writer wants to leave on the reader.

The second essay required me to use the existing skills I had, and it allowed me to improve and build upon new ones. The second essay, Field Observation of an Online Community, was probably one of the most enjoyable because the community I studied pertained to my passion for video games. Again, in the draft of this paper, my ideas were unorganized, and Professor Harris made the same comment I mentioned in the Feature Profile draft on my body paragraphs of this essay draft. At this point in time, I did think my organization and development did improve since the last essay, but since the online community I studied was so complex I felt the need to explain everything even if it did not really pertain to my main stance. I think this was a valuable exercise in the editing process because my second draft of this essay was about 300-500 words above the limit and I had to cut out what was not necessary, while, at the same time, trying to elaborate on some ideas that were critical to my paper. Thus, my editing skills and my ability to be more concise with my development of my ideas relating to my stance were definitely challenged with this assignment. In order to overcome this editing nightmare, I applied my goal-setting strategy mentioned previously and tackled each problem individually, and then trimmed down the word count, keeping the most critical information that supported my argument.

Finally, in the third essay, we created a research question and investigated that topic through using sources. In the Literature Review Essay, I experienced the least problems. This is because I have experience in the research process from my high school classes and I am relatively familiar with integrating sources into my own writing. However, this is my first time using the CCNY Library and online databases for research purposes. Thus, even though I am familiar with the research process, I gained experience in using new databases that I will most likely use in the future. I also feel like this paper was an opportunity to exercise all the new skills that I have acquired in previous assignments and apply them to this final essay, and I am very happy with the final results. In this essay specifically, the Course Learning Outcomes that I improved upon are: “formulating and articulating a stance through and in your writing, practicing using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects, strengthen your source use practices”.

As I look at the Course Learning Outcomes, I can see that almost every one of them is apparent not only in the writing itself but more importantly the process that led up to the final product. I did not really excise, “negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation” because my all writing was almost unbias unless the prompt required me to provide my own perspective. Another outcome that I missed was, “engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond” because I did not think it was completely necessary to include any other modes of media in conjunction with my writing to express my stance in the assignments given. Even though I did not exercise these Course Learning Outcomes, I developed other skills and abilities like drafting, editing, setting goals to guide me, and I strengthen skills such as the research process, integrating sources with my stance, etc… Overall, I think the progress and evolution I have made through completing this class is significant and I can’t wait to strengthen these skills even more in the future!