As a freshman undergraduate student, this FIQWS 10103 class has been challenging and I already found writing difficult in itself all through out high school. Which is why I was slightly nervous entering the semester mostly wondering what new topics I would be writing about and how much I would need to improve certain components of my writing like my researching or analytic skills. My personal paper is what determined my writing level at the beginning of the semester and gave my professor an idea of what weaknesses and strengths my writing consisted of. The formality to my writing was definitely not the greatest, as I did not even have a proper heading. Although I was able to place all my ideas in the essay, the organization of my ideas was poor but I was able to determine what strategies I needed to develop for reading and drafting. 

My experience with this course consisted of adapting to the new genres of writing that I was being introduced to for example, the Exploratory essay, the Exigence essay, the Research Critical Analysis Essay and the self reflections for those papers. They all had different criteria to follow and I had to provide analyzation of different concepts in each paper. My analytical skills and researching skills lacked for some of these papers as I was unable to develop a strong central thesis or make some of my ideas clear when analyzing the evidence I selected. I also had to learn to really involve myself in the peer review because since we were all virtual, it would be the only time to gain some feedback on my work and incorporate those new ideas into my writing.

Therefore, some course learning outcomes I was able to develop were:

• Exploring and analyzing, in writing and reading, a variety of genres
• Engaging in the collaborative and social aspects or writing processes
• Locating research sources in the library’s databases or archives on the internet

With my Exploratory essay, it was the first time having to involve myself in an extensive search for articles and books I could use to support my topic, more importantly my thesis statement and that’s when I learned of the CCNY Library databases. We participated in a zoom meeting with a librarian who showed us how to navigate around the virtual database and conduct our searches. For example, we learned that we could even order books or articles from other school’s databases through the CCNY library in case they did not have the specific piece. The librarian even taught us of the methods to minimizing what we search in order to find the specific evidence we needed. By simply removing or adding key words when searching a topic up allowed me to look at the articles relating specifically to the topic of my paper and I was amazed at the thousands of articles that appeared throughout my research.

The peer review I participated in was beneficial to all of papers and in particular my Exigence essay. When writing this paper I incorporated unnecessary information and left out a key component of the paper, which was to speak on the relevance and importance of civil engineering on the world and not just me. My peer Ronya was able to point these major mistakes and with that I was able to produce a improved version of this draft. I took out an entire paragraph that had no relevance to my topic and was able to incorporate a brand new paragraph talking about the importance of my topic on the world. It also helped the flow of my ideas and I was able to create a more on topic thesis statement and was able to support it using the new paragraph.

 

I was provided with a multitude of opportunities, from peer groups and Q&A’s to zoom sessions with CCNY librarians, to develop my writing skills and through this process I was able to succeed at some of the course learning outcomes like engaging in the social aspect of writing and analyzing and evaluating the different genres through reading and writing. I strive on carrying these skills with me in order to find more comfort when writing papers in the future and discovering even more genres of writing. I also want to be able to see the growth in my writing by receiving new revisions in the future and that way I know I am applying my newly developed skills.