Throughout this semester’s course in English composition, I learned greatly about the world of language and writing. With the course objectives presented in the semester, I was challenged to practice and improve my skills.

Amongst the various learning objectives, my perspective grew greatly towards examining “how attitudes towards linguistic standards empower and oppress language users.” This objective is an interesting topic that sparked deep reflections which assisted my strong understanding. My strong knowledge of this learning goal can be reflected in my Language and Literacy narrative. In this writing, I examined the personal experiences that those around me and I have faced from linguistic standards that negatively impacted our perspectives. Similarly, I demonstrated my understanding through the Rhetorical Analysis essay in which I carefully analyzed a TED Talk by an artist who had been hurt by language expectations and developed the statement of how standards prevent the population from finding their true self which is a demonstration of oppression towards language users. Along with the studies on other passages given in class about linguistic standards, my comprehension is well built in this learning objective.

Exploring and analyzing a variety of genres and rhetorical situations is another objective that I was able to meet with great understanding. This is portrayed through the classwork and homework on the passages in the course reader as our course reader presents a variety of genres of writings from authors with different backgrounds. My understanding can also be shown through my Rhetorical Analysis and Researched Exploratory essays as I studied different types of texts. In my analysis essay, I worked through an informative video while I researched scholarly articles and non-scholarly articles in my researched essay. As these texts were different forms of writing and genres, I was able to identify the rhetorical situations of the text and produce new claims that can be supported by the texts. Even though I have a solid understanding of this goal, I believe I can explore even more genres of writing that I may have yet to interact with as much throughout this course.

Throughout all the major writing pieces, one of the most essential steps is the brainstorming and drafting process. Hence “developing strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing” is crucial. I believe I have not fully reached this objective to its full extent as oftentimes I face the difficulty of revising my writings to express my ideas more clearly. Though all of the writing pieces created have been carefully drafted by breaking down texts when reading and getting feedback through collaboration, editing becomes a difficult step as I am unsure of how to enhance my writing pieces further. For each of my essays and narratives, my final versions are my draft versions with minor edits in areas of grammar and sentence structure. My ideas stay consistent through the draft and final, therefore in my view, this is an area where I can continue to improve. Likewise, I can work on my skills to “recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations.” Even though I can recognize patterns through reading writings multiple times, it is difficult to make the connection to a rhetorical term without searching them up. Hence, throughout my essays, I can only identify the more common terms such as logos, ethos, and repetition. Therefore, I can focus on building more progress in these areas moving forward.

Towards the last portions of the course, the essays focused heavily on analysis and research, producing the Rhetorical Analysis essay and the Researched Exploratory essay. Within both essays, I “compose texts that integrate a stance with appropriate sources, using strategies such as summary, analysis, synthesis, and argumentation” and “practice systematic application of citation conventions” to a fine extent. As I have been exposed to these skill sets in the past, I developed them more throughout the writing pieces in this course. However, I haven’t had as much exposure to “ locate research sources (including academic journal articles, magazine and newspaper articles) in the library’s databases or archives and on the internet and evaluate them for credibility, accuracy, timeliness, and bias” hence this is an objective that I can continue to work on. Despite this objective being a new experience, I explored and understood how to locate such sources and evaluate them. More practice in the future will help me achieve this goal with a greater understanding.

To summarize, this course greatly challenged me to strengthen my weaker areas and enhance my stronger areas in writing. Overall, my understanding throughout this course was clear and I gained lots of new insights on the topics taught in this course.