About Me:

I am currently a freshman at CUNY City College taking the class English 10100. Early in life I had a difficult time trying to speak the language and used to go to a speech pathologist in order to speak the language better. I became more interested about learning the language when I started to watch more films and tv shows and learning became entertaining. During my time in this class, I have learned to enjoy reading more so than before as I used to force myself to read content that I was not particularly interested in. Throughout the reading and analyzation, I did, I expanded upon learning the English language as well as learn to be a better writer. 

 

Self-Assessment:

The first essay that I was assigned was the Narrative Essay which was a personal narrative essay that was supposed to depict an impactful moment in my life. I wrote a narrative about an incident that took place during my time volunteering at New York Presbyterian Queens Hospital. I felt after writing that essay, I had become better at telling a cohesive story as well as become better at using specific details to draw the reader in. A major skill that I have started to develop was expanding my vocabulary which helped me to create all of the vivid details in the narrative. 

 

Using more analytical words to give the audience a proper setting and depressing tone of the hospital room was crucial to the overall progression of the narrator (me) to want to live life to the fullest and not take everything for granted.

The next essay that I was assigned was the Exploratory Essay in which I was given the freedom to pick a topic that had opposing sides and give an information non-biased overview of both sides of the argument. This Essay tested my skills of scholarly research as I was learning how to use websites such as Jstor and Google scholar in order to use evidence in my essay. Although I found it to be quite strenuous to find articles specifically pertaining to my topic, the amount of reading helped me to build mental stamina and longer attention span as I wanted to find the answers to my topic but pushed myself to research more after every failed attempt. 

In this essay I realized that I needed to work more on my sentence structure and tense while writing. I also saw that I also needed to fix my introduction of the evidence by providing the name of the author, as well as put their name in the page citation.

This is the feedback from one of my peers on my Exploratory Essay:

This is the feedback from my Professor on my Exploratory Essay:

Unfortunately the advice I received from my peers during the Exploratory Essay was vague and not the most helpful, however the professor’s comments helped to shed light on what I have to improve on. Through my professor’s comments I would be able to strengthen my reasonings and analyzation of my CRA Essay which is based on the same topic.

The final essay that I was assigned was the Critical Research Analysis (CRA) Essay. In this essay, our professor allowed us to pick a side of the previous Exploratory Essay and provide evidence and reasoning as to why the side I pick was the better choice. This essay was the test of how well I would be able to synthesize the data and evidence that I have gathered into a well thought-out and convincing argument to the reader that my thesis was correct over the opposing argument. In the CRA Essay, I chose the side of the argument that is not focused on in major news and media, and based off the classmates who peer reviewed my essay, I would say the argument was able to successfully convince them to my side of the argument and show how I have developed as a writer.

This is feedback given from a different peer while reading my CRA Essay:

I believed that I improved with expanding my vocabulary as well as synthesizing evidence to convey a strong arguement . I do however still think that I need to work on my grammar and making my thoughts clearer through better sentence structure

Using my skill of synthesizing evidence to create a strong arguement, I will be able to better handle job interviews and application processes in by giving evidence of how I am a viable contender how should get the position. I will also being able to have my ideas expressed and listened to more, since my reasoning will help the audience to understand my side of the arguement better than that of the opposing party.

However the least aspect in my writing is using quote citations and creating concise evidence in order to prove my arguement. I used mostly summarization to quote the texts I used and used in text citations only a few times. I would need to improve on cutting down how much I want to quote and find key words in text that better show my arguement rather than write a small paragraph of what the text is about.

I believe that Developing strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing have improved the most, since in high school I did not use to plan out my writing or create drafts. I would use to just start writing and create a “final draft” and my work would not be as cohesive and comprehensive as it would be if I had had revised and drafted more. Now that I created drafts for all of my papers, and got feedback from my professor and classmates, I was able to identify most of my mistakes in my writing as well as think of better ways that I can improve and articulate my writing to an advanced level in the near future.