I’m somewhat confident in my writing skills, at least as far as writing a college paper goes, so please forgive me if I give myself a generous assessment. What I won’t give myself a generous assessment in is academic planning; because of my poor performance in that area, I entered this class as a second semester senior instead of a second semester freshman as it’s intended. I think all of the course objectives are wonderfully suited for someone in their second semester at college and make for great practice for the essays they might have to write during the rest of their time at CCNY. Alas, my opinion on that is not really the point of this assignment! As far as if I achieved the course learning outcomes, I feel like I already had a pretty good grasp on them going in, though I’m sure there are some areas where I improved, because practicing anything makes you better at it.

As far as the first objective, “Acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility,” I’m not exactly sure If I improved. In my Multi-Cultural interview essay, I spoke to my boyfriend, and while we do have aspects of our cultures that are different, like the religion we were each raised in, we very much speak the same language and understand each other very clearly. I guess the ease of our communication may have lent to the rhetorical sensibility of that essay maybe.

“Enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment.” This one I feel like I had a pretty good grasp on, I also didn’t work very hard to revise my papers, I felt confident enough about my first drafts, and didn’t get much feedback during peer review, other than that the paper was good.

“Negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation.” I think I was able to move gracefully through the genres of the first three essays, and hopefully meet the audience’s expectations. I think I met the professors expectations, at least mostly, with the writing – certainly not the expectations of timeliness of the submissions..

“Develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.” I tried to be helpful in the peer reviews and really give the group I was with ideas for how to make their papers better. That was easier in some groups than others. This course learning objective shone a light on the differences in writing ability at the college level – this was the first class I took where I read anyone else’s writing. It was a good exercise to take what you might call a “Shitty First Draft” and try to extract the message that it means to convey, and advise the writer on how they may be able to clarify and strengthen that message.

“Engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond.” It wasn’t terribly difficult to understand what was expected as far as the genre of each paper went, and though the subjects were different I sort of feel like the genre of each of my papers were the same, sort of like casually analytical. I do feel like in each of the papers I was able to “formulate and articulate a stance through and in the writing.” I didn’t necessarily push myself to come up with any particularly novel or groundbreaking ideas or questions in my papers, I think there’s some room for improvement there.

“Practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects.” This one I felt like I got decent practice in, especially for the literature review essay. I’m not sure I’ve ever had to write an essay that required the use of scholarly sources, and using Google Scholar to sift through papers and find some that might apply to my topic was a fun and sort of challenging exercise. I didn’t really use any library resources, which I’m sure would have added more to my paper but feel like more work to find and extract information from. That said, I think this practice definitely helped me “Strengthen my source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources).” Especially analyzing, synthesizing and paraphrasing in the literature review essay. The Online Community essay is also a good and probably more interesting practice with analysis.

I think my digital portfolio presents decently, I tried to use some images and make it look good enough. I can’t say that I have done much work revising the essays or put much thought into the design of the page. I think this way of thinking and working also kept me from perhaps getting the most I could out of the class. I think for me to really have benefitted from the course learning objectives, I would have had to think of more interesting or ambitious ways to address them, as opposed to just writing these essays to get them done. My Senioritis definitely hurt the effort I put into the class, and I turned in many assignments late, including this one. However, I still think that the papers are of decent quality despite my not going above and beyond. Sorry, maybe that sounds arrogant and I’m not that!

I sort of feel like for me college was more about showing that I can finish something, so that the places I’m looking for work will take me seriously. It really hasn’t been much about what I’ve learned, though I have learned things, but don’t ask me questions about the philosophy class I took in my first year, I assure you I probably can’t answer them. This class and its outcomes and college in general have been good practice with follow-through. I hope to take that mentality of absolutely having to get something done, even if it’s a day or a week late, into the rest of my life now that my time at CCNY is over. I have a lot of personal projects and goals that I hope to be able to devote more time and thought to starting right away, or maybe after a month or two of relative relaxation.