Nathalie Membreno
Benjamin Swett
English 21003
16 May 2021
When heading into this semester, I was not excited about having to take another English course at City College. Due to my change in degree from a B.A in Psychology to a B.S, my earlier class of Writing for The Social Sciences no longer counted for my major. However, looking back at a semester of this course, I do believe that not only have I become a better writer, but I also learned some insight in being able to specifically look at writing as a part of my future. While taking this class I was also applying to internships to be working in labs as well as participating in other psychology classes that required me to read and analyze scholarly sources. This class was the founding base for me to be able to perform complete rhetorical analysis so easily. This revealed to me the importance that writing and reading will always have in my life and that one can never have enough writing classes. Maybe the world could be a better place if we all took more writing composition classes.
Although this was the second semester amidst the COVID pandemic, being all online still proved to be challenging. A part of me still missed the ability to be able to hold in-person peer- reviews. There was a different feeling compared to my other writing classes because they had the component of seeing people in person. However, I do believe that having a class that was on the smaller side made things feel as personal as they would while only seeing everyone’s upper half. Additionally, I think that spending a good portion of the semester doing group work allowed me to feel closer to my classmates. The biggest challenge of being all online however came with the workload my courses gave me. This made me feel like I did not have enough time to do the complete rough draft process I would have liked with each essay. However, I was able to modify it so that it could help me the most while still not taking too long. By having to do these changes, I believe it only made me learn myself as a writer even more and helped me have a thorough understanding of what needed to be done even while cramming with time. For example, when working on the group website, I felt that Jack and I could have spread out the work better. However, because we were on opposite work schedules we had to cram when creating our website. This made me feel like my end work was satisfactory but not the best I could have done. On the other hand, the modifications I made did allow me to have a shorter first draft process. An example of this can be seen in my first Rhetorical analysis essay, I was originally focusing too much on just paraphrasing my essay, but after it was read by my peers, they were able to point that out and I changed my essay a lot for my final draft. They even recommended having a bullet point list with all the rhetorical terms and when I explained each one I would check it off. Additionally, when creating our campaign webpage, after communicating through email we came to the conclusion that with our time it was not a good idea to include a social media account and instead decided to put our time into creating a chatbot which also tied in nicely with our campaign.
Another part of this class that helped me become a better writer this year actually happened because of the pandemic. In the past I felt like I did not have time to go to office hours, however this year, I enjoyed going over my essays during office hours. Through this I got to gain knowledge about rhetorical analysis and was able to understand that the reason why I got the grade was that I needed to specifically state each device. Through this, I was also able to learn that the way that I did it was not wrong and would actually help me in my next assignment which was the literature review. Additionally, a big aspect of this class that I enjoyed a lot was the topics that I chose to write about this year. One of my favorite topics was the rhetorical analysis essay where I read a scholarly journal about the negative effects that social media has on young Latina girls. This was a topic that was very dear to me with having my fellow Latina friends struggle with eating disorders as well as myself due to our culture. By analyzing this piece of work I also educated myself on this topic and it only made my writing experience better. Additionally, I really enjoyed the topic of AI and was able to also do research on how the future of Artificial Intelligence in the workplace could happen and what are the challenges behind it. This assignment also allowed me to get better at looking for scholarly articles in order to do a literature review. A big help in this was having the librarian join in class and teach us how to use the City College databases. I got to understand how I could narrow my search as well as use the blurb to figure out if a source would help me or not. Having to analyze at least three scholarly articles and having to incorporate them into my writing also allowed me to practice paraphrasing, quoting, and citing sources through not only MLA style but also APA.
Lastly, I really enjoyed the group work I got to do, especially because I loved that I got to create a website for a campaign as well as present our findings. I took pleasure in participating in the presentations that my peers created. I liked that this assignment allowed me to use a medium to present information that I had never had the chance to participate in. I got to create a website where I got to incorporate my own research as well as videos and colorful infographics. I especially admired that my partner was able to create a video where he put his own background into our website as well as edit my face into the video where I explained our research findings. It almost made me feel like a Youtuber, a feeling I haven’t gotten from any other English composition class.
