It is that time of the semester, where classes are coming to an end and all one can do is sit back and reflect on everything they accomplished, how they grow in terms of skills, mentally and what they could have done differently. As I am reflecting now, there are so many things I could have done differently, which I do have some regrets about because it has truly affected me mentally. However, despite having some regrets, I think I prospered well academically in terms of skills. FIQWS 1011 Thoughtful Choices is a very unique English class compared to the rest I had taken in my life. This class has offered me freedom to explore and write creatively in different styles, which has led me to do well academically. Throughout phase 1 to phase 3, I’ve learned skills and demonstrated my understanding of the skills through my work.  In this class, I was able to find my own tone and voice throughout every writing process and learned new ways to analyze and recognize rhetorical situations and skills to advance my writing. 

Phase 1 was an interesting phase as the focus of our first writing assignment was myself. Normally, writing classes would only teach how to write academic papers, but this phase involved a deeper understanding of my own writing and self. This was difficult because I never really took the time to reflect on myself and think about a deep moment I face and a deeper meaning to that moment. This led me to exploring the goal of  “recognize the role of language in empowering, oppressing, and hierarchizing languages and their users, and be open to communicating across different languages and cultures.” The goal was demonstrated through my personal narrative. Coming up with a moment in my life to focus on was difficult, as I never found a strong moment in my life that was big enough to connect to oppression, hierarchy, language barriers or other social issues. One moment that was recognizable was my accident with my front teeth in middle school. After writing my personal narrative and thinking about the bigger picture, I realized my bigger picture is middle school and how I reflected on those experiences is different from what my peers think of theirs. 

This introduction was my first step in recognizing a higher issue than my own situation. Most students have been through some form of middle school and they have hated it because of the weird and dramatic experiences they had gone through. Being kids trying to transition into a different stage of their lives. When concluding the personal narrative, I related back to the introduction, making the connection between middle school experience doesn’t have to be terrible, as I decided to think about it in a positive light. 

  There were two other skills that I was able to develop while working on my personal narratives. “Developing strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing,” is demonstrated between my first draft and my final full draft of the personal narrative. The first draft was just a quick writing piece, briefing going through the moments that happened during the accident. By reading my draft over, I then decided to include figurative language and imagery into moments of me running and sliding into the pole to emphasize what happened and to allow my audience to experience what I was experiencing. 

Personal Narrative: “Suddenly, it was hard to breathe, and my face was very hot compared to the rest of my body with the lingering taste of copper on my tongue. I pushed my tongue to feel for my teeth in the font but they were no longer there… I felt every muscle in my face ache and the pulsing pain of blood rushing out of my open nerves. The excruciating burning and stinging felt like my gum was sinking into lava.”

My first workshop in the class was useful, by getting to read other student’s work and see how they are going about completing the assignment. Through collaborating with my classmates I was able to recognize that my personal narrative was missing a bigger connection, which led me to connecting to how students view middle school. Experiencing workshops in class allowed me to build in a skill in “engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.” 

While my personal narrative helped me explore the skill “recognize the role of language in empowering, oppressing, and hierarchizing languages and their users, and be open to communicating across different languages and cultures;” I was able to understand the skill better through the reading “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan. I was able to pick apart the lines and recognize that language are not only barriers but there’s a sense of status surrounding it. In America, despite being a country made up of immigrants, people get poorly treated when they don’t speak fluent English. There was a moment in the reading where Amy’s mother was getting poorly treated at the hospital and dismissed until Amy spoke to the doctor. 

I thought phase 2 was more difficult than the other phases because it required me to use the new rhetorical features I learned and talk deeply about one of them through an article of my choosing. It was difficult because no article or any piece has just one rhetorical feature, they have plenty, from tone to logos, pathos and ethos. Before getting into the Rhetorical Essay, a discussion post that I had completed helped me “explore and analyze, in writing and reading a variety of genres and rhetorical situations,” and “Recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when in writing situations.” The discussion post was about “The Tent ” by Margaret Atwood, which became my favorite reading throughout this semester. 

I took notice of repetition used throughout the story and the connotation of the words, such as “ruins” and “howling” struck a feeling of fear and terror. The descriptive words that were not only repetitive but used to create pathos. It got its audience, including me to feel a certain way about what was going on in the story. I started to develop an understanding of in order to include rhetorical features like logos, pathos and ethos, there are other rhetorical devices used to help create those effects. This led me to “practice key rhetorical terms and strategies” through my rhetorical essay.

For the rhetorical essay, I didn’t know what articles I wanted to use or the topic I wanted to talk about. I was conflicted because my major is biochemistry, so I thought I should write something science related. But I also love writing and language, and I find myself well skilled in talking deeply about language. I wanted to create a paper that I would enjoy writing because during phase 2 I began to distance myself from being present in class and being caught up in my life responsibilities. I choose “English Belongs to Everybody” by Robert and MacNeil and ““If Black English isn’t a Language, Then Tell me What is?” by James Baldwin. Since the topic of the papers had to do with language and there were a lot of emotions present, I focused on pathos. I personally think pathos is the hardest rhetorical feature to explain and prove because the emotions are embedded within the words of the article unlike facts, first hand accounts that can be used to display logos and ethos. When analyzing the pathos  in the two articles, I noticed the tone and mood transitioning throughout the article, which became my first reasoning for the essay. The second argument in my essay was how words created the emotions the authors were trying to display. And to connect it all together, the third argument was a focus on how the pathos used influenced how the readers felt. Breaking down the articles and using pieces of them to help create my argument connects to one of the goals in this class: “Compose texts that integrate your stance with appropriate sources using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis and argumentation.” My style of writing is to have a paragraph that introduces the text in the beginning, who the author is, what the text was about and then get into my argument. Which is what I did for this essay. I had an introductory paragraph for both Robert MacNeil and James Baldwin essays but this was just touching this goal, not actually learning a skill to demonstrate it. Another difficult part of this essay was creating a style in my writing to appeal to a specific group of audience. I wanted my audience to be other students learning how to write with style, and wanting to know how to create certain effects with words. I felt that this essay was more about my own analysis on what I read and just me stating an argument but not actually appealing to an audience. Phase 2 was interesting because some of the goals I touched on in this phase were also goals I experienced in phase 3 and felt that I completed them. 

Phase 3 was mostly about revisiting a few goals and skills that I had learned and building off of it to better my writing skills. For “recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations,” and “compose texts that integrate your stance with appropriate sources using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation,” I mastered through synthesizing my sources and practicing rhetorical precis with different articles. Before Synthesizing articles together, I wrote a rhetorical precis that was in-depth about the credibility of the author, what the author intentions are, the purpose of the article and how they accomplished their message with rhetorical features. 

This example is from paragraph four of my research essay. Also included in this paragraph is a synthesis of Ronald W. Pies articles with Benjamin Miller articles “Mental illness is epidemic within the coronavirus pandemic.” In this synthesis, the common topic is mental illness and epidemics, there was a contrast between the two articles where Pies believes mental illness is not an epidemic but Miller argues mental illness is and that is due to the pandemic. 

Another goal that was well practiced in the third phase was “understand and use print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences.” My essay addressed many topics and it was clear on who the targeted audience was. The target audience included, those affected by the pandemic supported by paragraphs 4 and 5, students ranging from Kindergarten to College, both traditional and non-traditional college students and educators demonstrated from pages 7 to 11 of my essay. “Engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes,” was a goal I had revisited, and this took place in the second part of this FIQWS class, Scientific World, where the topic of the paper stemmed from a project in that class. In Scientific World, my group did a presentation on the set of questions I addressed in my research essay. The group had worked on different questions, which we shared in a document with the sources we gathered. Which was useful because it did save me some time from looking for certain information. This leads into “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.” While this goal was a bit challenging, it was also a skill I had previously worked on before this class, so finding proper sources was relatively easy for me, as I know what sources should not be used and one’s that are credible  The only difference in this skills that I did from my previous writing assignments, was I had to look for peer-reviewed articles. Luckily, I used search engines such as pubmed, school’s library and scholarly to help me find sources that were peer reviewed. 

The one goal that I have complete confidence in is “practice systematic application of citation conventions,” because it is the easiest and I have been doing it for years. I know how to cite my work at the end of my essays and throughout my essays in MLA and APA format. Coming out of this semester, I feel stronger in writing academic papers because I learned how to properly introduce articles and state the importance of those sources and why I am using it. Learning to Synthesize my sources allowed me to connect my sources smoothly together instead of chunks of paragraphs specific to one’s source. I know my ability to pick sources and evidence are strong but I do lack confidence in my analytical skills, despite the practice I experienced together. I feel as though I dance around the important connections I’m trying to state, that I explain both pieces but not actually put them together, which is what I hope to accomplish in the future. 

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