English 101
At the beginning of this writing course, my biggest concern was strengthening my writing abilities when writing any genre. Not only for small things like grammar or punctuation but also how to create a flow in my writing or integrate quotes from articles to highlight my stance/thesis. For that reason “Compose texts that integrate a stance with appropriate sources, using strategies such as summary, analysis, synthesis, and argumentation,” was the learning objective that stuck with me the most. This had everything that I wanted to achieve, however, I feel like it would’ve impacted my free-writing if I solely focused on formal type-writing. I feel that learning this will help me feel encouraged to be confident in my writing and the stances I take during the choice of genre.
The most important format that helped me during these phases was writing different drafts to fully gather my thoughts for what I wanted to write about. This can tie into outcome 3 “Develop strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing.” From my perspective, the pacing went well where we would brainstorm and then make a first draft. From the first draft, we made it longer and fully jotted down everything we wanted to including revisions. Which, also brings up how peer reviews also helped me. I feel like having small group reviews helped me be more comfortable showing my writing and expanding on which places I felt that I needed to work on. I would be able to explain a bit better because many people related to what I was trying to speak about in my writing. Peer reviews helped me organize and helped me understand how to incorporate certain things in my writing to strengthen it. These moments made me feel comfortable and welcomed to share my writing and feel inspired to open up more as a person when it came to my writing. The reason why I felt accomplished from being able to make use of my feedback is because of a comment my Professor made, which was “I also liked the revisions you made between the snapshot, the updated draft, and the final version.”
The reason why outcome 7 “Compose texts that integrate a stance with appropriate sources, using strategies such as summary, analysis, synthesis, and argumentation,” was shown throughout my writing because I felt that I used the environment around me to help me structure my writing. For example, I used different mentor texts to help me understand how to start and end my assignments because I always have trouble with them. Using the mentor texts that I found, I could summarize my thoughts and even my quotes to support my stance or opinion for any assignment. Here’s one example from phase 3 “‘So, continuing with the crying, there’s more crying. I don’t remember this, but my mom told me that when my sisters and I came home from school on many, many days, we were very frustrated. We were angry. And we would cry to her and say we want to go back to Poland. We hate this Canada. I hate speaking English or I hate this language. (Alex)’ This reflects the emotional challenges Alex and his sisters faced during their first days in Canada. It emphasizes the frustration, anger, and desire to return to their home country due to the difficulties of learning and adapting to a new language, highlighting the emotional toll that language barrier can have on immigrant students.” In my view, I notice how I tie my explanation to the quote back to my main thesis of how speaking another language is detrimental for students mentally and physically. Analyzing the prompt was difficult for me at times because I couldn’t comprehend what my assignment was, which would then have me asking for help. I think to have a good analysis I have to figure out the prompts on my own, to also show that I know what I am speaking about.
Outcome 7, was also shown during class when we were presented by Professor Erkinaz Shuminov. She made it a point to not shame us for how our writing was put or written. She made the classroom feel welcoming and light-hearted, which was very important to me. When we were presenting certain parts for phase 1, I was terrified about sharing my writing. I kept on comparing my writing to others during their shares and even degraded myself to the point where I didn’t want to share. However, when I went to share I felt relaxed when Professor Shuminov encouraged me to share and reminded me that it doesn’t have to be perfect. After the share, she subtly told me some things to do better in some areas and that helped me with my writing skills for phase 1. Another outcome that ties into my understanding of Outcome 7 was Outcome 5, which is “Understand and use print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences.” I feel that the peer reviews and presentations went into this and the feedback and critiques I received helped me improve as a writer.
In conclusion, I used the environment around me to help build my confidence when writing in different genres to understand the flow and specific things like including quotes. The most valuable lesson I learned was to believe in myself that I can do the task given and not compare myself to others.
