Yunhong Li
FIQWS 101008
Prof. Elisabeth von Uhl
12/12/2019
Final Self-Reflection
How time flies. More than three months of the FIQWS courses were over. As English is a second language student, I think through this short three months of learning, my English writing skill has improved significantly. In high school, I had an entire semester of time to finish a ten-pages essay. But for this course, I mainly wrote four essays of different types, which are literacy narrative, summary and response essay, exploratory essay and researched critical analysis essay. After finishing each writing assignment, I wrote a reflection essay help me to think about what I have learned from writing this essay and how I can improve in the next essay. These lots of writing assignments contributed to my writing, thinking, analyzing abilities.
However, I had many problems and difficulties during the process of writing these essays, which also made me challenged myself constantly. I remember the first formal writing assignment of this course was a literacy narrative. To my great surprise, my essay failed, and I had no idea why. Although it’s a short essay, I still spent a lot of time writing it carefully and went to the writing center to revise before I submitted it. I felt very disappointed. Until I went to my professor’s office hour and talked to her. I found that I not only had a lot of grammar problems, some descriptions and expression were not detailed and clear. Based on the professor’s comments, I continually worked with my tutor, tried to express my ideas correctly and clearly, and tried my best to reduced the grammar errors in this essay. Finally, my essay had greatly improved. After that, I understood constantly revising is the best way to improve the essay. There is no perfect essay, just you stop revising it.
Different from the literacy narrative, I couldn’t freely express my own thoughts in the summary and response essay and the other two essays. But by writing this summary and response essay, I have fully exercised my summary and analytical abilities, which also reflected my understanding of the reading materials. This laid the foundation for writing the exploratory essay. I have never written an exploratory essay before, I didn’t know what kind of writing mode it is. So this was a challenge for me. At first, I wrote many of my own opinions and speculations without any textual evidence to support them. That caused me to waste a lot of time and deleted a whole useless paragraph near the deadline. However, through the discussion with three other students in the professor’s office hours, I found out the problem timely and began to focus on using the rigorous and objective view to analyze and textual evidence as support. In addition, I didn’t completely understand the content of the course, which made it more difficult for me to write this essay. Fortunately, we had online peer review for the thesis of the exploratory essay. My peer’s comments and suggestions helped me improved my thesis and gave me some inspiration. That let me had a good start in writing this essay. Even though there were a lot of difficulties while I wrote this essay, but I still tried my best to finish this exploratory essay. Although the final essay I submitted had some shortages, I summed up this experience and learned how to write an exploratory essay correctly. Moreover, I realized that time management is very important for writing essay. I can’t wait until the last minute to drastically revise the essay. I have to use time wisely, finish the essay one day ahead of the due date, and make final revisions to the details of the essay near the submission time. I also learned how to use MLA format to do in-text citation and works cited page. Citation is very necessary for writing the exploratory essay and other researched paper. Therefore, I got good practices in this essay. This helped me prepare well for writing my last formal essay.
The critical researched analysis essay is my final paper for this course. I wrote this paper by using the skills and experiences I learned from the previous essays. It’s a long essay, that meant I must manage my time well because I needed to spend a lot of time doing the research, I couldn’t finish this essay in one day. So in the first week, I wrote an outline for this essay, that helped me started this essay easier. After that, I wrote three drafts and constantly revised based on the drafts. On the other hand, this critical researched analysis paper required me to use two scholarly articles as outside sources. So I used the website of CCNY library’s databases to search reliable articles that could support my thesis and arguments. In the search process, I read a lot of articles for finding the suitable articles that I could use in my essay. This increased the amount of reading I did, and my reading ability was also improved. At the same time, my essay became more persuasive by using the scholarly to prove my point of views. We did several peer reviews of the thesis and body paragraphs. I gained many useful comments and grammar modification suggestions from classmates. I used these valuable feedbacks to developed my essay. In this essay, I have been able to expertly use MAL format to do the citation. My explaining, analysis, understanding abilities had the obvious progress.
I have learned and had a deep understanding of the rhetorical terms from writing these four essays and each reflection. These terms are genre, exigence, purpose, adience, and stance. The first time I used these terms to describe my essay in the reflection, I couldn’t easily tell what stance is, what the relationship between me and my reader is, etc. I would think about these questions for a long time. But after writing these reflections for every essay, I gradually understood their meanings and quickly used them to describe my essays. Furthermore, the rhetorical terms help me set the direction of my writing and be familiar with my own writing, build a stable relationship with the reader. I really learned a lot of valuable things from this course, even if it’s a challenge, tough course. I’m glad to have witnessed the growth of my writing in this course. I will apply all the skills I learned and my experiences from this course to my future writing and make great achievements in writing.
