Self Assessment
Writing is a huge part of everyone’s life. Over the semester’s course my writing has had a huge improvement and impact on my life. Combining English and science is very important to me considering I want to do something in the medical field in the future. My writing in this class has grown immensely and has shown me that I can do it if I put my mind to it. The overall course outcomes have shown my improvement when it comes to reading, collaborating, and revising my discussion replies and essays. I have strengthened my overall reading, writing, and using library sources while synthesizing and analyzing my essays. I have shown strength in connecting certain subjects and make writing more meaningful to me. I improved on how to engage in the social aspects of writing. Lastly my engagement in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond to include public audiences.
Overall my writing experience in this class has made me improve my writing skills immensely considering from how I cohesively place my words together and take constructive criticism well. I become better at reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment. For example, from the beginning of the semester I wrote about a picture of my father to describe a thing. For example, “The photograph stands perched on top of a shelf in the living room. The gold frame has intricate swirls around the frame that makes the photo stand out. The gold frame is hard to the touch. It feels like touching hard clay. The framing is a medium sized square to hold the perfect memory. Inside the frame is a picture of my dad and me. My dad is seen sitting on a light blue couch with dark blue pillows to match. My dad’s beaming smile is shown while he is holding my younger self in his arms. I am seen with half closed eyes. My dad had on a a black sweater and black pants to match. His dark course hair combed swiftly, and his beard has some stubble. I had on a bib and an all-white outfit with matching white socks. My younger self had a sleepy smile on my little face. I only had a little bit of hair. The white wall behind us contrasted his outfit. My little hands lifted in the air. The framed picture is the first thing that catches my eye when I walk past it. A lit pink candle is right next to the photo. The fire crackling is heard through everyone’s ears. This photo captures the perfect memory of my dad.” This assignment made me want to go more in depth and improve my second draft because I wanted no typos or errors. This shows how I overcame my unorganized my thoughts when writing and going in detail.
Another way I improved in the learning outcomes is I have strengthened my overall reading, writing, and using library sources while synthesizing and analyzing my essays. One way that I have done this is by doing my literature review and taking constructive criticism and rewriting the whole essay. For example, “Cancer treatment like chemotherapy kills the red and white cells which make the body feel very fatigued. The author uses an informative tone which makes the audience engaged and want to learn or gain more knowledge from the data. “Appearance changes included hair loss, weight changes, scars, among others” (Van et al). The informative serious tone makes the reader empathetic for people who are withgoing changes with their body due to cancer. This informative tone lets the audience gather information about the mental health of cancer patients.”
A way I have shown strength in connecting certain subjects and make writing more meaningful is in the public awareness campaign me and my group decided to write about cancer research in my rhetorical analysis. I decided to work on cancer research because I have seen the struggle at home with cancer and I know many people have families who have cancer patients. In public awareness campaign we decided to do how can we account for teengers who suffer from anxiety. The public campaign was something important to me considering I know a lot of young people suffer from anxiety because of biological and the environment they have. This topic is not talked about as much and neither is mental health because of the stigma surrounding it. I decided to do a powerpoint presentation with information on anxiety and how anxiety affects your loved ones including online therapy. This includes engaging in the social aspects of writing considering my role played a huge part in my group considering I provided information on anxiety and links to online therapy/group therapy. I also provided the gantt chart for my group so everyone knew what they were doing. My engagement in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond to include public audiences was very effective in my rhetorical analysis and group project because of how I organized the gantt chart. In the rhetorical essay after doing my drafts I decided to my unorganized information and put it in a cohesive way that my audience can understand.
Writing has alway been important to me. Writing is therapeutic and like a gift to the world. I always take it serious because I loved reading and writing in high school. I think getting to think and analyze critically in this class and being able to to use my own ideas about cancer research and technology makes me happy considering most English classes don’t get to let you express yourself or interests. But in this class I got to do do my own research from library databases about cancer research and how anxiety affects cancer patients overall. My father had cancer and this topic is very important to me. It made me happy that I could use these ideas and write about for this english class. I definitely achieved my goals for this class and that was spelling and errors because I always struggled with that and I think I also improved on the literature review since I was confused on how to gather and put my ideas together. Expressing myself through my words was also very important to me because I don’t know how to put everything on paper, it sounds all mixed up but I definitely gotten better at putting all my ideas and organizing them to sound better. Overall I had a great writing experience and have improved immensely in my work over the course semester.
