Abstract: This is our last essay for the class and the purpose of this essay was to evaluate ourselves and our development over the course of the semester. I start off by explaining how one of the first readings we were given would become a very resourceful tool to refer back to when writing the different essays for the class. I then go into how I have achieved all of the course learning objectives of the class by doing things like engaging in the peer reviews, looking up sources online and taking notes during presentations in class. The explanations of each essay and how I worked on them over time is also presented, to show how my writing has evolved from January to now. By the end, there is an overall reflection of how I feel about the class and what I have taken away with me for the future.

Sofia Blandon

Professor McIntosh

Writing For the Humanities D 

7 May 2020

            Self- Assessment

When the semester started and I had my first day of Writing For the Humanities, I was excited, nervous, and also oblivious to the amount of knowledge I was about to obtain from the class. I decided to include pictures of the annotations I made on the reading by Lloyd F. Bitzer to my portfolio because this reading had an influence on every piece of writing I did for this class. The first few weeks we discussed what the overall message of the reading was, and I learned how to understand and write about a rhetorical situation. There were many aspects involved like tone, audience, genre, and exigence, which was a new word I had never heard before. Even though most of these words were familiar, as I had learned about them in my high school English classes, I feel that this class helped me dive a bit deeper into their overall purpose when writing an essay.  Audience is more than just stating who they are, when writing you have to think about why you are choosing to write to this particular audience, how they would react to reading your writing, what actions do you want them to take and what do you want them to walk away with after reading what you wrote. Tone is more than just oh the author has a very sad tone, you have to think about the implications of the tone and how it affects the overall point of the writing. Genre is more than just stating that it is fiction or nonfiction, again you have to think about why the author chose to use this genre and how it affects your view of the writing, for example a meme would have a different effect than a short story. All of these different aspects became that much more important in my writing because I wanted my writing to have meaning, and I wanted my readers to have an understanding of why I chose to write the way I wrote. One of the course learning objectives says that we will be able to “acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility” and I think having Bitzer’s readings helped me develop a sense of rhetorical sensibility as the semester progressed, and of course having discussions within the class helped as well. 

Another one of the course learning objectives says that we will be able to “enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment” which I believe that over the course of the semester we were all able to achieve. We were assigned many readings where we would discuss what we thought the rhetorical situation was and then pinpoint the exigence, the audience, the purpose, the tone, and the genre. This helped a lot when we would have peer review sessions and read each other’s essays because it allowed for well constructed feedback and the ability for us to really improve our essays. I included a few pictures of the peer reviewed drafts from my first essay, the opinion editorial, to show that before I was finished I had many revisions to make. My classmates were able to help me edit and revise my work, especially when it came down to the me element, which is my biggest struggle when writing. I tend to write a lot about a topic and give out a bunch of information, but I forget to make it sound more personal and connect it back to my own experiences or thoughts. For the opinion editorial piece that was the whole point, to share information about a pressing issue but to also connect it to your own thoughts, experiences, and feelings. After hearing this feedback from my peers, I had to go back and cut out a lot of information that was important but not necessary, and then think back to my own experiences out in the environment. This also hits one of the course learning objectives that states we will be able to, “develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes” as we had many opportunities to discuss our essays with each other and give our thoughts and feedback on what we thought the person could elaborate more or less on to improve their essays overall. I think the many readings that we were assigned throughout the semester also helped in achieving one of the course learning objectives that says we will be able to, “engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond” For most of the readings we did we would discuss the rhetorical situation, which included things like genre, and we would also explore the way that author wrote their piece and how it affected us as the reader. 

The second essay, which was a visual, was very fun to create and write about. For the visual essay I chose to talk about climate change again, only this time I would be providing an image that gets my message across faster than an actual paper. I think the idea of using an image to display a message about an overall issue is a good way to get it to people quicker, as I chose to use the genre of a meme, and if it were shared on social media it would be able to reach thousands of people everywhere. This goes into the third course learning objective, which says we will be able to “negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation” For the second essay I knew that I wanted to target republicans and I knew that I wanted to create a meme, because while it would be talking about a serious issue it would also keep things humorous. I used the conventions of genre and rhetorical situation to construct a meme, which was quite enjoyable because I had never been tasked with creating a meme for an assignment so going through the process of it was fun. I did not include any drafts to my portfolio because upon receiving feedback, I felt comfortable with how the visual was presented and the explanation that followed about how I decided to create the meme based off of the audience I was targeting. 

The last essay was a bit more tricky, as it was almost like a research paper but not quite. I provided a draft of this essay in my portfolio because I wanted to show that when you start working on something, it will not always stay the same, especially after receiving feedback. At first I had a set plan on what I was going to write about and I had a thesis to go with this idea, which was how we all deserve equal healthcare, but after getting feedback and steered in the right direction, I had to go back and change my thesis as well as the information in a few of the other paragraphs. With this essay I essentially needed to choose a stance and stick with it all the way through, which hits one of the course learning objectives that states we will all be able to, “formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing” I think this can be said for all of the essays we created this semester, each time we needed to pick a topic and then choose a stance regarding that topic. For example in the first two essays I was all for spreading awareness about climate change and working towards finding a solution, while other people could choose a different stance and talk about how they think climate change is not real. For the last essay I chose to talk about how important equal healthcare is, especially regarding today’s society. In using information from the databases, the text I chose to use as the basis of my essay, and the popular media sources I was able to create a well informed essay about healthcare. This also hits another course learning objective that says, “practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects” to which this can be seen in all three of the essays as well, since all of the information gathered for these essays came from the databases or the internet for popular media sources. While it was sometimes difficult finding sources that were relevant to what I was writing about, searching through this information was not rocket science, and after thorough research I think I found many sources that pertained to my writing and were actually very interesting to read about. For example, the article about universal healthcare that I used in my third essay, which talked about how other countries like Canada and Western Europe have their own equal healthcare systems that seem to be doing well, as opposed to the United States which is way behind. 

The last course learning objective says, “strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources)” I think it is safe to say that over the course of the semester we all have been able to achieve this. I remember one day in class when we had a presentation about using quotes and how to properly place them and when we should use them. This was very helpful because sometimes I get lost and I put quotes in places that they should not be, or I use quotes that do not really pertain to my writing, so going over this aspect of writing was extremely helpful and guided me for the rest of the essays I was going to write. I believe we also touched upon citing sources, although most of us have been doing this since highschool so it was already familiar to us and was not too hard to get the hang of incorporating into our papers. 

When I think about the questions, “What is writing? What does writing do?” I have to sit back and think for a minute. When I think about writing, the idea of expression comes to mind. When you write, you are essentially expressing your thoughts more detailed and intricate than if you would have said it out loud. When I think about what writing does, I think that it expresses these detailed thoughts to others who might feel the same and who might not. This then creates discussion among many other people, who might also feel the need to write out their thoughts as well. I think writing also portrays a story, which is why so many people read, to get lost in this story and escape from reality, in some cases as not all genres are the same and do not have this purpose. These however are just my thoughts off the top of my head when I think about these two questions, but after going through this class and developing my writing over the coming months I feel like I have a different perspective on writing. Writing is a form of expression, but it is also a call to action. When we wrote about the different pressing issues in society, we were essentially writing out to people that we wanted to make a change, we wanted people to read what we wrote and understand why these issues are important and should be resolved in any way possible. Writing can also create hope for a change, I am sure there are a lot of people reading articles about the coronavirus and hoping to hear news about a vaccine or cases dropping. Writing also creates connections, as mentioned before people might agree with what someone writes and thus that creates a connection to the reader, which is ultimately what an author hopes for. 

Overall, I think this class was super helpful and very fun. I was very sad when we switched to remote learning, but nonetheless still happy with what we were learning and the essays we needed to create. I think that our professor was also very helpful, every time I had a question or needed just a little bit more guidance she was always happy to assist in any way possible. While being a good writer is something that you develop over time, I think it starts with having a good teacher to get you on your feet, and we definitely had that this semester. Of course, there is always room for improvement and I am excited to continue to improve in my writing.