Throughout my entire educational journey, I’ve had to write essays and pieces to pass classes with what a rubric that each teacher would attach and a list of restrictions and what had to be in your essay. If you went out of the rubric, you would get a low score and it would heavily affect your overall class grade. So even though you can get creative with your vocabulary, I felt as if I was restricted, and I could not write how I wanted. I know there have to be guidelines but with so many restrictions I felt I couldn’t write what I wanted to write or how I wanted to write it. It was more of following the rubric and just doing it for the sake of a grade. For the first time, I could structure it and write my writing as I like. It felt good to enjoy writing and not have so many restrictions. Use my creativity to write and express whatever I wanted and having to worry about my grade. So I enjoyed that and using that grading system has taught me so many ways to improve my writing with not only the new techniques that I’ve learned but all the new things I have learned to add to my essay even stronger and better. Another really helpful way that my writing improved was with all the peer edits that I have received from my classmates. Because it’s nice to get other opinions about your writing from others and see what they think you can improve on. Especially when you are stuck, and you want other ideas to improve your essay, it’s nice to have other people’s feedback. Also, the friendly comments and feedback from the professor were helpful, because you see which skills you have mastered and skills that you need to improve on. Also using the Course Learning Objectives helped me write and give me a guideline of what to include and keep in mind when writing. I believe that I’ve come a long way from my first essay in phase one which was multimodal language & literacy narrative, to the rhetorical analysis essay, and finally the research essay.  From all the feedback and new techniques, I’ve learned. 

In my first essay which was the multimodal language & literacy narrative essay, I wrote about an issue that I experienced just like Amy Tang. I wrote about a conflict of how much my parent’s broken English affected me and how my parents get judged based on their broken English.  I used my personal experience and connected it to Amy Tang, which I’ve never done before. I also I’ve had a group of people we targeted my essay towards. I never even thought about who my audience was, to be completely honest the only person who had to understand and was supposed to target was my teacher or whoever was reading my essay. Now I keep an audience in mind and write to people that not only connect and feel what I went through but people who make fun of people who speak broken English to make them understand that it’s not okay and how we all come from immigrants at some point. Just like Amy Tan I wanted my essay to reach out to anyone no matter what race or what language their parents speak or what language they speak. Being able to “Recognize the role of language attitudes and standards in empowering, oppressing, and hierarchizing languages and their users, and be open to communicating across different languages and cultures.”I used my emotions and what I was feeling so I can try to help the readers understand what I was going through. Which allowed me to “engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.”Then while workshops and peer review, I took feedback from others and using that to improve my writing; I think it was very helpful to me because there is someone else who is not me who thinks that everything I’ve written is correct or when I got stuck and how to expand my writing;  it was good that I got someone else’s point of view. Not to mention how we had to present our writing using a media source. I made a slideshow and explained the sides and had a little video of me. I had many presentations, but it was a first doing it over zoom having it pre-recorded, which I thought would be easier than doing it live but I was wrong. I found it just as challenging. I got to see my other classmates’ presentations as well and it amazed me with their creative presentations, and it was a better way of getting to know them. For the first essay, I thought I did decent considering that I’ve had such a freeway of writing it. From the professor, I’ve got much helpful feedback as well such as adding longer sentences and mentioning more experiences. 

For my next essay, the rhetorical analysis essay I choose the story Tongue Tied by Maxine Hong Kingston. Where I went in-depth with all the rhetorical devices she used while writing her narrative, and how she develops her story helps us envision her experience. I got to break apart her essay and understand each line that she put. I spent a lot of time understanding the purpose and what strategies she used to make her writing so compassionate and descriptive. By breaking up the text I could analyze the language she used, and the comparison that she used to contrast how she felt when she spoke and her learning environment in an American school and Chinese school. I identified the tone that she used to make her emotions and story more significant. Allowing me to “recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations.” While using many quotes that showed that. I’ve interpreted the literary devices and put them in my writing and understanding and try to find out why the writer wrote how they did.  I also learned how to improve my writing to make sure the readers understand what I’m going through. I think I’ve become a better writer because of reading all these stories and finding out how these writers are inviting and it helped me write my essay because I’ve implemented some of their techniques in my writing. Using rhetorical terms I could understand the specific techniques and how to incorporate them in my writing, “explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations.”  As you can see I’ve learned so much more than my first essay, and I could take my feedback on making my sentences longer and using more examples and incorporated them into my writing. Also editing and having other peers edit my essay helped a lot in improving my essay.

In the last essay, the research essay I had to learn many things to put into my essay. Such as how to write a rhetorical precis and its synthesis. I’ve never done those before so it was interesting to learn. Using the precis I used that to incorporate it in my essay along with the synthesis quote. The research paper was a little different from a normal essay because I had to read many sources and articles which took a lot of time and find specific quotes that would go well with my thesis. Also to make my thesis even stronger which was how culture and society affect our language and our lives. I used credible resources and primary and secondary sources to back my thesis. It was kind of hard to do. But I used what I’ve learned from my previous essay and put it into this essay along with the rhetorical precis and synthesis. Which allowed me to explore and complete, “Compose texts that integrate your stance with appropriate sources using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation.”After finding the quotes elaborating and summarizing them was important, and connecting it back to my thesis. Even though I’ve been using the MLA structure for all my writing in this essay, it was heavily emphasized and I used it on the work cited page. Including the author’s purposes, tones, and what type of audiences that authors are trying to reach, and included in my essay.  I’ve learned while writing this was writing in MLA format and how to elaborate and understand what the author is saying and picking out specific quotes that support my thesis well. Being able 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, accuracy, timeliness, and bias.” and “practicing the systematic application of citation conventions.” I learn to develop my thesis by using information from these articles to strengthen my thesis. I was pretty impressed with what I’ve come up with.

 All in all, it has been such a journey to come this far in my writing with all the new learning curves of this year. We have all had to adapt to the alternative way of learning and even though we are trapped at home I enjoyed using some of that time to improve my writing. The writing was always something that I’ve been interested in but never fully been able to do. I learned so many new ways and styles of writing. I felt as if I could write in my way without being held back and just to get a grade. I’ve also read some amazing narratives and watched powerful videos that I’ll never forget. I enjoyed not only being in this class but writing all these essays. It was extremely fun and was not pressured to write them at all. Best of all I had an amazing professor that helped me get to the place I am in my writing with the help of my peers. I will continue to grow as a writer and carry the skills I learned in this class with me.  

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