Aiyanna Nicholson
Professor Matias
ENGL 21003
16 May 2022
Self-Assessment Essay
Throughout this semester, I have completed multiple essays and other writing assignments that have both pushed me as well as taught me various skills and different techniques when it comes to writing, or more specifically writing in a scientific sense. Be it through rhetorical strategies, research experiences, and even developing various arguments in my writing, I have always been able to grow more and expand my literary capabilities due to the course learning outcomes that I have encountered during this semester.
Rhetorical analysis was one of the first aspects that was integrated in my writing. To provide an example of this, at the beginning of the course, the first discussion board was centered on choosing a super power and convincing other people why the super power I chose was the best one through whatever method would be most convincing. In this blackboard post, I specifically worte “If I had to pick a superpower that matches my personality best, I would choose the ability to teleport. I think that this superpower is the best because no matter what situation you’re in you will be able to easily get out of it by traveling somewhere else.” In this case the rhetoric that I chose to use was logos because I provided a relatable scenario or in other words a universal experience of having to wake up really early for school just so you can get there on time, a problem that could easily be solved with teleportation. This discussion board was only the tip of the iceberg in my use of rhetorical strategies, the first big assignment that I really had to apply it to was my scientific controversy essay. In that assignment, picking an audience was the first step towards writing the essay. My topic was on the sustainability of fossil fuels and based on that, I decided that the most logical audience would be essentially everyone who would listen or more specifically those that supported fossil fuels and didn’t really believe in global warming. Based on that decision, I had to make sure that my essay would be understandable enough for the average citizen. An example of this in my essay can be seen in my introduction where I mentioned that “ Fossil fuels are natural resources made from decaying plants and animals that can be found within different layers of the ground. Once these natural deposits are found, they are then burned so they can transform into different forms of energy.” In these first two sentences I made sure to provide some background on what exactly fossil fuels were so that my target audience could have a better chance at seeing the different perspectives to my argument and just have an overall understanding of what I was writing about. Moving onto the next assignment and the last one that I completed this semester is the children’s book. In this case the rhetorical approach that was taken was arguably the most important part of the assignment. My group’s topic was on Anorexia and the age range for our book were children that were around 10-11 years old. As I mentioned in my previous essay, the type of language that we used had to appeal and make sense to children that were in that age range so my group members and I had to be careful when wording every page that we were writing. On one of the pages in my book “A Battle with my Body.” I wrote “ For the first time when I really looked in the mirror, I realized just how thin my hair had become. I immediately became worried and my head began to fill with bad thoughts.” In this sentence, both the structure and words such as “bad thoughts” were all rhetorical choices that were made in favor of my younger audience. The topic of our book was also a major rhetorical choice because taking into account that the audience is 10-11 years olds, eating disorders was a good option due to children being at a higher risk to developing one around the ages of 11-12 years old.
The next important part when it came to my writing assignments for this course was the revision process and overall collaboration that happened at certain points between my peers and I. Personally I really liked revisions because from them I was able to take in the feedback and make my essays even better. Although I preferred teacher feedback, it was an interesting experience getting to read one of my classmates’ essays to see what their thoughts were on an assignment and how they even interpreted it. In conjunction with peer review and the collaborative research project, the flipped classroom exercise was the only other time that I got to engage closely with other people in the class. With that presentation I was nervous at first but everything became easier when we learned how to divide the work which was basically each person doing 2 questions and making their respective slides on it. My group for the children’s book took a similar stance when it came to dividing the work and we did this by each doing 2 pages, In this case, it was my job to do pages 5 and 6. Now that I am reflecting on both of these experiences that I had working with other people, I have learned that the most important thing that granted success in both groups was how well we all were able to communicate with each other to get our work done on time and in a coherent manner.
The last thing that I want to discuss is my overall process when completing these assignments which includes the research I underwent, certain writing strategies that I used to improve my writing and how I found stronger ways to both analyze my evidence and use quotes. The research part of any writing assignment has to be the hardest part in my opinion and the thing that is the most time consuming. An example of this is when I was doing research for my scientific controversy essay I found it very difficult to find strong academic articles through City colleges one search library. The most helpful thing throughout my research process was when I used keywords such as “ climate change” or “greenhouse gasses”. The title of one of my articles was “ Depletion of Fossil Fuels and Anthropogenic Climate change—A Review.” I was able to find this article through City colleges database with a combination of words such as “fossil fuel climate change”. From that point forward it became slightly easier to branch off of the searches that I already had. The one positive thing that came with this online research was how I had experience with City College’s online library from my last semester which meant that navigating the site wasn’t a problem. Going back to the Collaborative research project, that was the first time when I looked into gathering evidence from other internet sources outside of City Colleges but I still need to familiarize myself with using other databases such as google scholar. In this semester I feel that I have especially strengthened my writing even more and that’s all because of the higher standards for verb usage and just the overall incorporation of how the quotes had to be. To elaborate I was really pushed to find a better way to introduce my quotes and analyze certain pieces of evidence and I definitely see how it made a difference in my writing. On Blackboard there was a worksheet of different verbs that we could use for our Literature review and it came as a big help for me. An example of this in my writing in the literature review is “ Ivy Shiue, another researcher and author of “Correlations of indoor second-hand smoking, household smoking rules, regional deprivation and children mental health: Scottish Health Survey, 2013.” complicates what Chen stated in his article…” Here I integrated the word complicates from the verb worksheet to compare two sources and me having simply exchanged a more rudimentary word for this one made my essay that much stronger. Drawing back to my scientific controversy essay, I paraphrased a lot of quotes for the first time which was something that I was not used to but I can see how it created some variation within my essay and even made it more concise. In providing evidence, a quote that I paraphrased was” Asthma is the fastest growing chronic disease in our nation, afflicting more than 22 million U.S citizens according to the American Lung Association” (Mcnerney, et al., 156). Examples like this can be seen not just in my scientific controversy essay but also in my literature review as well.
In all, for the entirety of this semester, I have been able to hone my literary abilities that I came in with while being able to learn different strategies that have both improved and strengthened my own writing. I know that what I have taken from this course will follow me throughout my college career and I can only grow more from here.
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