This was my first semester of college and first ever college level English course. I was a bit worried because I wasn’t sure of what to expect from this class. Also, my writing skills were my worst attribute. I have always struggled with my writing assignments in high school. As my teachers use to say after almost all my writing assignments, “Moe you gotta work on your writing more”. Initially, I picked this course just because it matched my schedule and the leadership aspect of this course caught my attention. I always wanted to learn about how leadership works. I have learned a lot about leadership in this course, but the writing section of this course have really thought me the most. My writing skills have improved drastically over the semester. There were many things such as understanding the analyzing sources, rhetorical terms, and being able to use the CCNY library database were the elements that contributed to my progress the most. Also, all the feedback that I received from my professor and my classmates were huge part of my progress.
One of the very first thing that I have learned from this course was analyzing sources. Most of the assignments were required to include outside sources. Well, my research skills were not as efficient as it should be for college students. That’s where Professor Sarah Cohn, reference and instruction librarian, came in play. We spent some class time with her, and I found out that there is a CCNY database to find sources and how to navigate sources. Also, I was able to learn how to evaluate if a source is credible or not. This was very new to me because prior to this class, I have never checked the credibility of a source. In high school, all I did was that I only used sources related to my topic without considering its credibility. This course made me realize that not every source is credible. Also, my research skills have become more efficient and will continue to get better as I work on it more.
Another thing that I learned was writing a college level paper. To make that possible, first I had to learn all the rhetorical terms such as purpose, audience, genre, etc. I already knew what they were, but this course allowed me to understand them more in dept. This automatically improved my writing because to write a good paper you have to understand the rhetorical terms. In the past, I used to write paper without considering any of the terms and just simply answer the prompt questions. That’s the last thing you should think of doing and learned it the hard way when all my professors have repeatedly told me that I was missing my rhetorical terms. Overall, I have learned how to use all the rhetorical terms in my writing but introducing the author/ source when using an outside source to support my claims. That’s the only thing that struggle the most. For all my papers I have received a comment saying, “introduce the source”. I have a long way to go in that category.
Last thing that I have learned is that there is always room to improve your writings and its better to let more than a pair of eyes look at the paper before writing the final draft. For all the assignments we wrote more than one draft. After each draft, we had a class workshop where I received a lot of feedbacks of how I can improve my paper. Also, the mistakes were the ones that I did not see. After the workshops, I received feedbacks from my professor and most of the mistakes she pointed out were completely different from my classmates. This help me improve my writing a lot. While writing my next papers, I would think of mistakes that I made in my previous writings. This made realize that to write a great paper, you have to let others edit it other than yourself. I learned a lot about my writings during the workshops.
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