The Self-Assessment Essay

This Spring 2022 semester I had the pleasure of taking ENGL 210: Writing for Engineering with Professor Jacobson. I will be assessing my development as a writer during my time in this course and using my writing as evidence to support it. I will go into depth to explain to what extent I have achieved the learning objectives of this course as well as the ways that my perceptions of what writing is and does evolve this semester. I will use the information quoted from the course website to reference the goals and I will use information from my own writing.

Goal One

The first goal is, “(you will) Acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility”. This goal I found one of the surprising yet simple goals that I achieved during this semester. In Highschool generally, the students in my class had very similar writing skills so when we peer-reviewed it wasn’t much of a learning experience. Everyone’s writing was very similar and at the most, it was mainly grammar issues that were focused on. However, in a college English class, that is not the case at all. Students in a college English class have vastly different backgrounds and have very different writing skills. So, a peer review in this class, for example, was actually very effective. Getting the opportunity to work with a range of linguistic differences, allowed me as a writer to observe different writing techniques and skills that I had never used before and be able to use this in my own writing. For example, in one of my classmate’s lab report analyses, they had sourced their information differently than I did. Typically, when I sourced information that I needed I quoted the information and then ended it with an in-text citation. However, instead of doing that for every piece of evidence, the classmate of mine would just use the author’s last name and then included the quoted excerpt or a paraphrased section and then an in-text citation. So, if I were the author they would write, “Kohn made it evident here that…” or “Kohn explains that…” etc. I found this interesting because I had never referenced information like that in an assignment so after I read theirs, I went back and included this writing tool in my own writing.

Goal Two

The second goal is, “(you will) Enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment. This goal I feel I achieved. We spent a lot of time in this course learning these strategies and the writing process as well as having plenty of time to make sure we worked on every one of these strategies. Because of this, I feel it gave me the opportunity to work sufficiently on each of these strategies allowing me to improve at them. I felt I worked on my first drafts differently than I had in other writing classes. Usually, I would perfect the first draft and spend a lot of time editing and revising while formulating the first draft. This led to problems where instead of focusing on making sure I have all the information down that I want to include and making sure the main idea is in the first draft, I had focused on making sure that it looked perfect and that there weren’t any grammar or spelling errors. This led to the draft not being as strong as it could have been. What I learned to do in this writing class is to just get the first draft out and not stop every five seconds to fix everything that I didn’t like about it. I think this was enforced by the fact that it felt we had less time to get out a first draft than we did to get the final draft out. So, since it was a time crunch to get a first draft out I didn’t have the time to sit around and edit every sentence until it was perfect. I had to get the first draft together that maybe wasn’t perfect and didn’t flow the way I wanted it to and probably included way too much writing. In doing this I left myself a lot to work with when I went to edit and then revise which I think ended up being a stronger method than what I was doing previously.

Goal Three

            The third goal is, “(you will) Negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of the genre, medium, and rhetorical situation.”. My writing goals were to improve from where I started and to learn more about technical writing. Both of which I feel I accomplished. We worked on several different types of technical writing in this class and all of which I had never really done before. I worked on all of these throughout the semester, and I feel I have improved and learned which led me to reach my writing goals.  

Goal Four

            The fourth goal is, “(you will) Develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes”. This goal was achieved mainly through the group project and proposal. In that project, I worked with an amazing group of students, and I worked on collaborative writing and working on the project with my group. I have done group projects in the past, but this is the first time I had done collaborative writing. We spent a lot of time in class talking to each other about the product we wanted to make, and I felt it was a constructive use of time. After we had decided on an item, we talked about every component in detail to make sure it would work. We made a discord that allowed us to communicate outside of class to work on the project which attributed to the social aspects of the writing process along with the planning aspect of the project. We worked on every step of the writing process together, but we spent most of our time planning and outlining our project which I think helped us end up with a great project we received a hundred on.

Goal Five

            The fifth goal is, “(You will) engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond”. I think this was fulfilled by the lab report analysis assignment. We had to find and analyze two lab reports which were of all different genres, and we explored strong writing in all different lab reports. I am not sure if this is what the goal is asking here or if it is talking about our own writing and how we wrote in all different disciplinary contexts, which we also did. Either way, I felt this goal was achieved.

Goal Six

            The sixth goal is, “(You will) Formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing.”. I felt this was something I worked on in class. In my writing throughout my life, specifically in high school, I was always taught how to write persuasively. There is this huge focus on making sure we were able to have a strong persuasive stance in our writing and to show our opinion clearly and prove our opinion to the reader. What was different about the writing in this class is that that is exactly what we were not supposed to do. The assignments were made to be written without opinions being included. It is formal writing, and it shouldn’t include personal pronouns and just overall an indifferent stance. I learned how to do this throughout this course, and it was a skill I had never really worked on before and I think it was a really important goal that I reached.

Goal Seven

            The seventh goal is,” (You will) Practice using various library resources, online databases, and the internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects.”. This goal I felt was achieved through the Lab Report Analysis assignment. For this assignment, I learned how to use the CCNY Library Database to find Lab Reports to use for the Lab Report Analysis. I found this an important skill we worked on, and I found great Lab Reports to use for my analysis.

Goal Eight

            The eighth goal is, “(You will) Strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources).”. I feel I reached this goal and I had talked about this in the first goal. I really do feel the way I integrate sources is so much better than where I had started, although this paper is a bad reflection of that. I think this is one of the ways that I still need to work on because I am not used to citing this way, but I do think it is something that will stay with me when I source information and I do think I have strengthened my source use practiced dramatically comparative to how I started.

What is Writing?

Writing is the act of forming ideas, expressing emotions, and organizing information using words without speaking. Examples of this would be rules and regulations, signs, essays, literature, and much more. This can be done by physically writing on paper, typing on a computer, etc. Writing is a way to record information, provide relevance to your thoughts, and generally communicate with an audience with more permanence than speaking. This is at most a definition but however you define it, writing is a crucial skill to have. One that is imperative for everyone to have. Writing can be professional, or it can be casual, it could be as small as a text message and as massive as a textbook. Writing is what makes up so much of our world and is truly an incredibly important art form that everyone.

In What Ways Have My Perceptions on What Writing is and Does Evolved This Semester?

I have learned that I was not as well versed in writing as I had thought I was. I had never really used Microsoft Word, I had never written in APA format, and I had never written collaboratively before.

Over the semester I learned how to do all these things and I feel overall it has improved my writing skills. I have learning disabilities including ADHD and dyslexia, so writing was not easy for me growing up. I first learned how to read in 5^th grade. However, I can see that my writing improves with every paper written despite the difficulty and that is something that I have worked very hard to achieve.

Learning how to use Microsoft Word sounds like it would be simple, but it is tedious to learn how to format with a new software let alone how to format with a format you are not familiar with, this being APA format for me. I found this difficult and tedious to start, but as the semester went on my skills and knowledge of both dramatically increased which made it exponentially easier to format my work.

I have worked collaboratively on projects before, but I have never written collaboratively before. I found it a very interesting experience and I am thankful I had such an amazing group of people to work with. Overall, I found this experience enjoyable.

During this semester I not only learned how to do things that I had never done before, but I also worked on strengthening a lot of skills I already had. I learned from peer-review a lot about my own writing by reading what other peers had written and of course, my paper was also being reviewed. Reading other students’ work broadened the way I would typically formulaically do something. Citing for example. Typically, when I would cite something, I would write a quote and then at the end do parenthetical in-text citations. I remember reading fellow students’ work for the lab report assignment and noticing that they had referenced their information in a different way. They had used the author’s name of the source they were using and paraphrased the information and then ended with an intext citation. This method flowed much better and made it much easier to read. I found this interesting and integrated this into my own paper after.

This pattern of reading other students’ work, noticing a writing tool I haven’t used before, and then integrating this into my own work, was an important skill I learned during this course. I think being in a college-level writing class allowed for the class to have students who have all different writing skill levels allowed for this to happen.

Overall, I feel that over this semester my writing has improved. I have learned new skills that I will carry on through my academic and professional career, and skills that I will continue to use throughout my life.