Final Reflection/Self-Assessment

            The Freshman Inquiry and Writing Seminar or better known as FIQWS was a combined English class that I took this semester that helped me acquire a college-level reading, writing, and thinking skill. In this course there was a variety of genres, rhetorical situations, purpose, and audience. The different types of assignments such as the Literacy Narrative, Poetic Response, Annotated Bibliography, and Researched Critical Analysis demonstrates that I have learned and understood the rhetorical terms and met the course learning outcomes.

The Literacy Narrative was the first assignment that I was given and in for the essay I had to write about how literature affects me. At first glace the essay seemed very difficult for me because I’m not the biggest fan of literature but after thinking about it, I realized that literature is a big part of me. I wrote about how important literature was throughout my life, my immigration to America, learning English, expanding my knowledge, and eventually falling in love with books. I was able to appeal to other people around my age that were able to relate to my struggles and “hate” for literature, but also, I was able to appeal to adults that are still struggling with literature, immigrants that are still trying to figure out the language. The Literacy Narrative forced me to talk about myself which is something that I’m not a complete fan of but it helped express myself tremendously. While writing this essay is when I realized how much of personification fan I was. I brought Literature to life, made it my enemy, my frenemy (friend and enemy), my friend, and lastly friend zoned. Getting feedback was a great help in this essay too because it made me feel better for personifying Literature because everyone loved it, and the feedback also helped me revise certain things to make the literacy narrative clearer. Writing for me is always about being able to entertain the audience and to make it relatable and I believed I did that with this. My advice for myself for any future Literacy Narratives would be just proofread it more and eliminate any punctuation errors.

The Poetic Response was an assignment I actually very intrigued in because I wanted to test myself and see if I can write decent poetry. This assignment helped me understand that anyone can be a poet if they both passion and their heart into whatever they are writing about. The three different poems that I wrote about is 9/11 which is the historical event, my grandfather who is part of my identity, and unfamiliar emotion. The poem “unfamiliar emotion” didn’t even get its title until the very last line, which I wrote two days after I thought I was finished with the poem. For this poem I just let my fingers type whatever it wanted to without thinking. The last line, “I think I’m falling in love”, just came to me and I don’t believe the poem would’ve been finished without it. It just tied everything together and truly showed why it is a soliloquy. It was me sharing my emotions and thoughts with the audience about all these feelings and how they are affecting me. I think one of the reasons the audience would be able to relate to it the most and understand the real emotion behind every word. Writing the poem “They” I felt very passionate about the anger and hurt I feel every single day. It wasn’t very easy for me to write it because I wanted the poem to have a nice flow and rhythm. But at the end the poem turned out to be a Ballad with phrases being repeated to almost sound like a song. I would imagine this poem to be recited in an angry, almost growling tone and towards the end a soft angelic voice that says, “may God forgive them”. The third poem is called “Nana”, and it’s about my grandfather who passed away a couple of months ago. The elegy poem shows the love and respect I have for me and just how much he is missed. The purpose of the poem was to serve as an outlet for me and the audience to know that people lose their love ones every single day and it’s the memories that we have of them that will keep us sane. After writing all three poems I wanted to go back and edit them or put more things in it and delete some other things but I know if I did, they wouldn’t be as real as they are right now. Writing this ballad, soliloquy, and elegy motivated me to write more and express more.

The Annotated Bibliography was a way for us to analyze our secondary sources and weigh their credibility and when writing the RCA. We first had to gather three secondary sources which for me was difficult to find because every scholarly article that I found seem to just be general information. Although we went to the library and learned how to access the database and find articles, I was a little stuck. But soon I found my three secondary sources and wrote a brief summary about each source and how it can be used towards my paper and claims.

The research critical analysis paper was a paper that required me to create an argumentative essay based on my selected topic and use rhetorical analysis and research to support my claims. I was very confused on what to do or what topic I should choose. I finally decided on topic 2, the depiction of fandoms and started to do research on it. I started with the background history of the boyband and where they originated from and how they became a world-wide phenomenon. I allowed my audience to get to know who exactly the band is even if they never heard of One Direction. Finding a Primary source was hard but then I finally decided on the movie One Direction: This is Us because it depicted the way the boyband and the fandom interacted. In addition to that I researched academic journal articles and appeal to logos to support my claims with statistics and interviewed a fan that knows everything about the fandom she’s apart of and the band she supports. During the process of doing the RCA, one of the best helps were the peer reviews that my group did for me. It helped me pinpoint exactly what I need to improve and how to make my paper better for the first draft as well as the second. This was a very hard assignment for me because I just had a hard time finding a topic, then finding the claims, then finding the sources, then putting it all together in an organized manner. However, it taught me a lot about research and now I practically know the citations like the back of my hand.

Although English has never been my favorite subject and never will be, I always end up learning really important things in that class. One of them being always to properly cite before you end you failing something because you didn’t know you plagiarized. I walked into this class not knowing what to expect, I wasn’t sure what kind of readings I had to do or how many essays I had to write a week, but leaving this class I know that I learned more than I think. Practicing all these different types of genres and utilizing so many rhetorical devices made me into a better writer than what I was before and it’s only moving forward now.

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