Self Assessment

    This semester I have learned very important things about my classmates’ languages. In my language and literacy narrative I had to open up about my own experiences with my native language which is Spanish. Telling my story and hearing my peers sparked an interest in me that I know will not go away easily. I am now more comfortable talking to people who have accents or do not speak English as well as I do. Analyzing the rhetorical aspects of a source as well as a genre was tricky for me due to my weakness in researching. However I appreciated the experience that has led me to have a greater understanding of different types of sources and where they come from. The constant essays that we had to do this semester forced me to revise and edit my drafts to the best of my ability. I had to repeatedly cut an add in certain places as well as correct grammar. I feel as though I have always been good at this part; the only challenge for me is creating new ideas. Rhetorical devices have also been useful to me when writing, especially the use of logos. Logos is definitely my favorite due to my right brain type personality. I love to appeal to the logical side of things and after specifically in my explanatory essay, the skill definitely further developed. I am not exactly a social butterfly therefore when I had to collaborate with people I had to gut up as best as I could and accept their feedback wherever it needed to be. However the teacher made the class feel more at home so it was not that nerve-racking. Working with technology was very convenient due to it enabling me to write my essays wherever I wanted to. I am glad I took this class first so that I can get used to the websites of CUNY so that I can start my college career with a little bit of experience. Searching for sources was what was definitely the most difficult part of this semester because they are never the right ones that you need. Nonetheless, I was able to utilize the library database. The constant searching and weeding out to distinguish biased sources from unbiased sources has taught me so much about what sites are reliable and I found looking for sources to be more comfortable in the end. I found that allowing myself to take a stance in my argumentative essay as well as compare sources was not that difficult for me because the paper was set to be four pages long which allowed a lot of room for this type of writing. However I did struggle with my insecurity of sounding too repetitive. Finally, the citation aspect of this course was always a simple process for me because there were always many resources online that would help create citations so that I would be able to memorize the formats quickly.