This semester was a very fast, stressful, but overall interesting semester. Looking back at all the progress I’ve made from when I first started this class I can genuinely say that I am proud of all the work I have done and all the effort I’ve put in. When I first started this writing course I was very used to the generic/ standard form of writing an essay. Which Included a lot of details, evidence, a professional tone, etc. This class introduced me to writing an op-ed, a visual and critical analysis essay where I discovered that there was more to writing essays than just the standard way I had learned. For my first assignment, the Opinion Editorial, this essay genre was definitely something I had not been used too. Incorporating my opinions and feelings in other essays was something I’d always avoid because it didn’t sound professional, however in this essay I needed to include these things which were foreign to me. When creating this essay the elements that helped me were analyzing and choosing op-eds as the source I get my evidence from because not only did it give me a good example of how to write an op-ed it also gave me sufficient evidence to make my argument stronger. To form my thesis I looked at multiple op-eds about racial discrimination that would best relate to my audience. The various strategies I used to connect to my audience was using logos such as data, tables, and statistics to present my argument to my audience that leans more to facts. I also appealed to my audience by using a personal tone and referring to personal experiences. For my second essay the visual essay. This was also a format that was foreign to me because it was a lot less writing and more visuals than I’m usually used to.  For this essay some strategies I used to form my essay was getting my images from valuable sources and making sure that the images I got were from a credible source. Also when looking for images I tried to look for images that I can combine together and that support one another so that my explanation of the images could be clear. Also I used a combination of regular pictures, pictures of data, pictures in a different scenery to expand my explanation. To connect to my audience I used multiple images that appealed to people in an emotional way but also in a logistic way so that every image was different. This was the most creative essay I have done because it allowed me to step out of my comfort zone and do an essay in a format I have never done before.  It was also a little difficult because I tried to keep the writing minimal because for this essay it should be more visual than anything so I had to shorten down or separate big chunks of writing to summarize and edit them. Lastly, the critical analysis essay was by far the most difficult essay I have written in this course. The most difficult part about this essay was finding 5 good sources both scholarly and popular because I wanted both kinds of sources to have useful information but I also wanted to be able to connect it with my main source that I was analyzing. Another thing that was difficult for me was working with more than three sources. This was  my first time working with five and a challenge I faced was having them all correlate in a way but also relate to my main source whether it was arguing against, supporting it, or adding on to it. A strategy I used to find my scholarly sources was using google scholar or the cuny website. I also learned to skim sources and pinpoint the important information of each source so that I’m balancing the information from each source equally. Additionally, when reading the articles I was faced with a lot of articles that had a lot of additional  information and things I did not need so I searched each source for evidence and information that supported my thesis only.  Through finishing all these essays there were a variety of steps I took to ensure that I hand in my best work. First, I chose my topic. I wanted to do racial discrimination because it has a lot of sub topics and a lot of different things you can talk about. After , I created my thesis depending on the essay I was writing. I would either look for credible sources both scholarly and popular, op-eds , or just credible images. Then after picking out my sources I would analyze and separate any extra information from the information I wanted to use on my essay. Then I would cite my sources using an MLA citation machine.  I would write each essay in portions not all at once because I wanted not only my peers to review it but also my professor so that I can receive different feedback from different points of views. This helped me a lot with my essays because using the feedback given from both my professor and peers it guided me throughout each essay. My expectations in this class were to gain a new understanding of how to write different kinds of essays and learn new skills and throughout the class all my expectations were fulfilled. Through my peer reviews, short assignments about the essay, one on one conversations it not only made the workload a little lighter but it also introduced me to new Ideas because I got to see what my peers were writing about while also receiving feedback from the professor which helped me finish constructing my essays in the end. Also the free writes in the beginning of class really allowed my brain to start working and coming up with ideas. It was also a great way to connect and really get to learn more about my classmates and professor. Through this course I have had many course learning outcomes. I have Developed strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing through collaborating with my peers and my professor to not only edit my essay but to also give them feedback. I created multiple drafts for each essay so that I can repeatedly revise it so my final could be its absolute best. I also ​​Composed texts that integrated my stance with appropriate sources using strategies such as summary when I wanted to summarize and paraphrase a specific section of a source, argumentation when presenting my argument to the audience, and lastly critical analysis for my last essay when analyzing each source. Additionally I Explored and analyzed, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations such as pathos, egos, and logos when reading op-ed’s, research essays, etc. Because when writing my essays I needed examples and additional evidence so I got to explore different genres to see which one would fit my essay best. Lastly I was able to locate these sources by using the CUNY website. The most challenging part of this course was writing different kinds of essays I had not explored before. It allowed me to step out of my comfort zone but the resources given to me like the mini lessons, meetings, readings helped me a lot in the construction of each essay. It was not easy but a successful outcome was I developed a new creative understanding of english and also learned some new skills that I can apply to other english classes in the future.

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