Self-Assessment
Throughout this entire semester of being a student in Freshman composition, I’ve been able to focus more on my skills when it comes to analyzing texts and synthesizing information, while reviewing key rhetorical elements such as the purpose, main argument, and audience to help understand the reading and strengthen my claims within my writing. In this semester I’ve been able to do somewhat of a good job meeting the course objectives while my idea of writing in terms of its purpose and nature has also shifted a little. All the things that have been mentioned have helped shape my understanding of what writing is during this semester.
From the beginning of this class up to now, I’ve somewhat of a good job at acknowledging mine and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, to where I take in from those resources to develop rhetorical stability. A good example can be during the peer review process sessions in class, specifically during the critical analysis essays. Where my peers and I would go over each other’s claims, evidence, and analysis. We would constantly share ideas in relation to the cited evidence, analysis, and how it connects to the claims that we created in our essays. The ideas that I took during the peer review helped improve entire rhetoric and approach in writing during the critical analysis essay. Which also highlights the 4th learning objective in regard to engaging in collaborative and social aspects in writing as this was a very important part for me during the course to help strengthen my essays. During my first draft of the essay, there were a few moments where things could have been a lot clearer. In the second page of my essay, I said “Copland’s use of language holds more of an accusatory tone towards sensuous listeners. Highlighting that they aren’t qualified music lovers as they say they are, due to abusing the sensuous plane of listening, where sensuous listeners only listen to music because it sounds good and for the basic purpose of trying to escape their daily issues without thinking about the other qualities that make the music.” During the peer review, one of my peers, Husna, mentioned how I could combine the sentences together to make my ideas and writing clearer. Shortly after, when writing the final draft, I was able to simplify and take Husna’s ideas into account where I wrote “Copland’s use of language holds more of an accusatory tone towards sensuous listeners as if he is critiquing them harshly on the spot, emphasizing that they aren’t qualified music lovers as they say they are.” Which sounded a lot clearer than before.
Over the course of the semester, I was able to find good ways to enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessing my work. For instance, during the Argument Research Essay, after completing our first draft we then moved on to a reverse outline. It was my first time doing it, which helped open a new perspective when it came to editing, reading, and assessing my first drafts. Having to restrict the number of words that you can use to describe each paragraph that you wrote to ensure that each paragraph has a clear idea was something new to me. This also leads to the 3rd learning objective which is being able to negotiate my writing goals and the audience’s expectations in conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation. As a result of finding ways to enhance strategies for editing and self-assessing such as doing a reverse outline, I was able to develop the things that I wanted to focus on such as my analysis and context within my writing to make my claims clearer so that it fits the audiences’ expectations of a clean rhetorical situation and medium.
During the semester, I have gone over genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing through different texts and readings. In class, I have read various essays and articles regarding musicians and the context behind the style of music that was made during the 60s. Analyzing the various ways of writing and structure from each author has helped strengthen my ways of writing as I always had trouble trying to make my stance clearer, which goes onto the 6th learning objective. During the first few essays within the semester, which was the analysis essay, my thesis was a little unclear stating “He explains the three states of listening to music with the analogy of three distinct planes. Where he then highlights his main point that each plane has its own issues, some more and some less, that limits people’s experience when listening to music.” My peer Husna mentioned how the thesis can be clearer, where you can combine into one sentence, since it seems like it is introducing two ideas. This has also been an issue for me before. In my final essay, I adjusted it as “Copland compares the three states of listening to music to the analogy of three distinct planes, where he highlights each plane and its own issues that can limit people’s experience when listening to music.” Making it shorter and taking out words that didn’t need to be there. Allowing my stance and topic be more concise and simpler.
In the course I focused on library resources such as going on the City College Of New York library database to look for appropriate sources to fit my writings especially during my Argument Research Essay. My Annotated Bibliography is all filled with sources that came from the database to help build research my essay. At first it was challenging since it was very new to me, but it has helped me tremendously in finding good sources to help back up my claims. With the evidence and sources, I’ve used because of library resources, I believe I can do a better job in terms of citing my sources, paraphrasing, and analyzing. I feel like there is less variety in the way I introduce my evidence. There are more quotations and less paraphrasing which would’ve been better for more variety in ways I would introduce my sources for both of my essays. My analysis could use some more work, as sometimes it’s too short.
“As a listener, the screaming behind Max Roach’s drum fills held a lot of frustration and anger, where it could be seen as some type of outcry from the countless years of racial inequality. Which explains the headline that Hentoff wrote “A civil rights protest album on which she sang (and screamed) helped bring out racial divisions in jazz during the early 1960s” (2). The entire album helped highlight the racial injustice that was running in the U.S. and the negative experience that people of color had to face as result of it, shedding more light on the issues that the Civil Rights Movement were protesting.” (Argument research essay).
I connected the source back to my main idea. However, I could’ve have gone into more detail in regards into more of the rhetorical devices the newspaper had and its author, and how that strengthens my claim as well.
The entirety of the semester, I have read through many readings and have been exposed to many new resources and ideas to help aid my writing. I believe I have gotten better in terms of trying to make my claims, especially my thesis clearer to my audience but it is still a work of progress. My in-depth analysis and choice of citing my sources could also be something to work on as write in the future. The question “What is writing” is still something that I’m trying to figure out. It’s for me to pinpoint an actual answer to define it, but I believe it’s another way of expression like music. You provide context which can act as a form of a hook which then leads to a claim where it then builds into a structure that is meant to express what you feel.
