Introduction

I believe that my writing has improved throughout the semester. Over the course I have grown and learned more than I thought possible. This FIQWS 10115 is my first year of composition course in college. Which helped me to increase my writing level and taught me how to write as a college level student. This class has a set of course learning outcomes that I was expected to learn and fulfill in each essay This course is consisted of three major essays: the identity narrative essay, the descriptive essay, and the researched critical analysis essay. The genre of each essay is totally different from the another. By writing these different types of essay, I have learned how to write for different purposes and audiences. Also, for the each essay I was required to write a self-reflection. Self-reflection helped me to explore and analyze my own writing which is one of the course learning outcomes. I also did annotated bibliography and a presentation in class. All these variety of writing helped me to learn different types of course learning outcomes and helped to become a better writer.

Identity narrative was the first assignment that I was required to write in this class. The purpose of this essay was to write about a events or experience that have happened to me and, which shapes a part of who I am today. At first, I didn’t get the concept of identity narrative essay and I wrote the essay in a wrong way and professor Rodwell said that I wrote an expository essay. Then, she gave me more clear idea about identity narrative essay and she gave me idea about how can I write identity narrative essay using same information. She explain to me that instead of talking about many experience in my essay, I should write and focus on only a specific moment and how that specific experience have changed me. After that, when I was rewriting the essay I kept remembering myself that I should stick to one experience and only write about that which helped me to write the identity narrative essay in correct way. Even after rewrite I still had to revise and edit my whole essay for better grade which helped me to learn the curse learning outcomes about revising and editing. By writing this essay, I have learned the genres and rhetorical situation of the identity narrative essay.

In the descriptive essay, I thought that I did really good job but after I got the paper back I saw that I didn’t get the grade as I expected. But the professor gave good feedback and she made comments about where did I do wrong and what I need to fix which was really helpful fixing the essay. For example:

In this part of the essay my professor showed me that instead of using 2nd person and 3rd person, I should write in 1st person since I was writing about my own experience. I remembered that I was using so many different voice in the descriptive essay, however I able to fixed it because professor Rodwell pointed out my mistake. This helped me to understand key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations which is one of the course learning outcomes. Another example from descriptive essay:

Here my professor pointed out all the mistake that I made in my descriptive essay. This feedback was really helpful because it helped me to recognize my mistake and I leaned to develop strategies for drafting which is one of the course learning outcomes. Then, I rewrite the essay using her feedback and I did much better writing the descriptive essay than my first draft and ended up getting a good grade.

The research critical analysis essay was different genres of essay. I had to do research on my topic which was about importance of preschool. For my researched critical analysis we were required to 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 which fulfill one of the course learning outcomes. By writing this essay I learned how to write researched critical analysis essay based on our own research. The most important thing that I learn from this essay is how to cite properly and how to find credible sources. I learned how to cite in ASA format.

One of the most difficult things for me when writing essays is organizing my ideas and thoughts. But organizing the idea for writing essay become much easier because before writing the each essay we were required to create an outline for our essay which made it more easier and clear for me to organize my ideas. Writing an outline also saved my lot of time during writing the whole essay because since I had my outline and I knew what I need to write and how I would write. For example:

This is an example of my outline that I created for researched critical analysis essay. I never wrote research critical analysis essay before. So this essay was completely new for me and because of that it was really hard for me to organize my idea but creating an outline helped me so much during writing. I just followed my outline and wrote the whole essay. I think writing an outline before every essay is beneficial.

Also, one of my greatest weaknesses is my use of commas. I often use very long sentences with lots of information but forget to use commas to break up my long winded thoughts. But by doing peer review in class where my group member helped me to fix my problem with my commas. They also helped me with my grammatical mistake. I think peer review was beneficial because by doing this we all able to exchanged our essay, read each one of them, and edited grammatical mistake. In this process we gave our input on each other essays, criticism, and suggestion to improve our essays which help each of us to make our essay better. By doing peer review, I also able to engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing process which is one of the course learning outcomes.

Overall this freshman composition class helped me grow as a writer and improved my quality of writing. In this class my professor and classmates helped me point out all the mistakes that I was making in my writing, because of this I was able to recognize my mistakes and fix my writing. Still, my writing might not be perfect but I am definitely sure that it’s better than before. I believe that this course was a great way to start my first year of college and I am blessed that I have learn so much in this course.