They say that growth is never ending, and my work in this class has seen so much significant growth throughout the last four months that I fully believe this to be true. I entered this class without having taken an English class for the last three years, and I had forgotten so many skills that were needed in writing. I walked in thinking this was going to be an average English class where we read dull pieces of writing and expected to write hundreds of pages, but once the semester began I was proven wrong. I started gaining back my confidence in my writing and creativity. The professor allowed us to have so much creative freedom and presented the assignments in a way that helped us all understand the objectives and processes of each essay. During phase one we discussed the experiences of immigrants and their take on broken English and immigrant parents. For our writing we had to discuss a time where reading or writing had a fundamental impact in our lives, I chose to write about my new found love for reading as well as my struggles as an immigrant learning English. For this phase I successfully achieved one of the course’s learning objectives, “Develop strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing”.

 As I mentioned before, I had not taken an English class in three years. This made me lose my ability to effectively collaborate with my classmates and revise my work with feedback that I had received. This class allowed me to relearn this process and become comfortable with it once again. In phase two is where I witnessed the most growth, this is when we worked on rhetorical analysis. In high school when we worked on rhetorical essays we only focused on a rhetorical strategy and how the author used it throughout their work. But in this class I saw that a rhetorical essay needed more than that. The professor did an amazing job at explaining and breaking down how to tackle a rhetorical reading, how to create a rhetorical precis and synthesis, and how to integrate our sources effectively. After learning all of these new strategies I successfully achieved another one of the course’s learning objectives, “Compose texts that integrate your stance with appropriate sources using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation”.

 I found this objective a bit difficult to achieve since I had never heard of a rhetorical precis nor a synthesis, but as the professor broke it down I found that I had unconsciously been doing that with my writings this entire time. Once I had a clear and stable idea of what was expected of my writing, I found that my writing has gotten stronger. These rhetorical strategies really support one’s writing and allows the audience to connect with the writing even more. Phase three allowed me to reinforce the new strategies I had learned with a topic of my interest. In this phase I grew my rhetorical strategies even more by practicing and memorizing the steps. I also grew my research strategies and learned even more about our library system and the different databases. In this phase I am proud to say that I achieved two of the course’s learning objectives: “Develop strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing” as well as “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, accuracy, timeliness, and bias”.

Before coming to phase three I was not aware that our online library had different databases that I had access to. This new information allowed me to reach new sources and made it easier to pick a topic that I wanted to research without having to worry about having limited sources. Phase four is this assessment and it is giving me the chance to reflect back on my work and realizing that I have grown so much in my writing and reading skills in just four months. I know that  my writing is not flawless and that I have a lot more to learn, but I believe that this class created a really strong foundation for my writing and I will continue to use these skills for the rest of my college career.