Johanni Valerio

Professor Ewan

FIQWS

13 May 2019

My Experience through the course FIQWS Writing Composition

Dear English department,

When I started this English course my knowledge of writing properly was not close to what it is now that I have gone through the class. My writing mindset at the beginning of this class was mainly at a high school level. But throughout the weeks this class has enhanced the way I used to see the process of writing which was just putting ideas on a paper and that all. Now these skills have helped me. The way I see citation, thesis have changed to a more sophisticated level because of the papers that consisted of lots of research we have done throughout the course. The strategies, rhetorical terms made more sense with each assignment I have done. These made  skills have grown me as a writer and learner. I have learned to analyze things with greater capacity. Attending this college course allowed my knowledge of Academic writing to expand and be fully aware of how college work functions. This class through the use of explanation grew my way of writing a paper, making significant progress from when I was foreign to this level of work.

In FIQWS our assignments dealt with many ways of writing. The first assignment we did for FIQWS was an Introductory Letter that introduced ourselves to the professor academically. This was the first college assignment in this class, and it was where I noticed that proofreading is important so that you avoid grammatical errors. When getting this assignment, I thought about how many times I have written a letter. But different from all those letters I wrote, this one had instructions, and explanations to follow. In particular, this introductory letter had an audience, and my voice had to be subjective, which means using several first-person terms. This letter was the first assignment that introduced me to the academic format called MLA. MLA is a method to document writing that requires things like a one-inch margin, double spacing throughout, and don’t space out paragraphs instead use indent.  I struggled with this at the start, not knowing how the heading is structured. Although I accomplished doing the assignment correctly, I should have been able to understand MLA at that time, instead of learning it by the third assignment. This letter not only taught me how to introduce myself with a sophisticated language but it also taught me how to write format in a new academic format, that I was once foreign to..

As the class progressed, so did my understanding of the language being used in the class. One of our assignments was the literacy narrative Essay. This assignment was an autobiography dealing with a thematic focus. This was about narrating reading and writing events that have impacted us. The assignment gave me the opportunity to add credit to my claims with the use of  examples which shows how I gained literacy skills. The use of experiences helped support why I it was a struggle to be bilingual, showing my understanding of credibility. When informing people about my situation here, I used a lot of emotion, ethos, so that they can connect fully understand this situation. That’s the skill of rhetorical situation, like logos, pathos  I used personal experience to draw the attention of the reader because it gives a rhetorical appeal, also known as ethos. A literacy narrative also has genres which in this case deals with hocombining information, personal experience, and a thesis all in one. The synthesis was really important since all the experiences had a vital connection to the thesis showing an argument that convinces personally.  By combining this information it was more organized in presenting my claims and opinions. When writing this Literacy Narrative my writing struggles changed with the use use of these skills, and learning how to defend even a story with enough evidence and less fallacies.

As the course went on the  most challenging assignment in this whole course was the Expository Essay. It dealt with components like your arguments,  research and investigate an idea, gathering and presenting your view. This had a lot to be put in, especially the annotated bibliography which was a list of citations to books, articles, and documents. Then each citation you used needs a brief summary paragraph of why this source is relevant to the focus of your essay, the thesis. The annotated bibliography has a format for the citations we extensively learned throughout the course, due to there being a specific format for MLA 8th edition. That is why this essay , this particular  page needed much proofreading towards the sources. This annotated bibliography was vital in this essay since these sources are what I considered using to support my argument about the positive effects of Puppets in language acquisition. The use of citation conventions was a big part of the essay for the reader to be able to look back at where this source came from. Subtopics were important in such a huge assignment as it narrowed down the central topic. The audience for this expository essay was both subjective and objective combining these both to sound informative yet argument from your own voice. These writing styles help make good judgments of the information. For example, the objective style of thing will make the argument less bias. The objective was the style mostly used since I was proving an argument with less opinion and more information. In addition after drafting my essay, my peer review of it was very helpful. First I was able to see from my peer’s review that my title was not correct, that my in-text citation was not properly put, as I put the author’s last name and then their name then introducing the quote. I was able to correct that in my final draft. The peer reviews helped me see their perspective of my work. While peer reviewing others papers it will allow, to learn errors they may not see in their own paper. It will allow me to incorporate to be more critical to my own written. Sometimes we are bias towards our papers but for example when I reviewed Joelis and many other’s papers I learned to always proofread and critique my own writing.

One of the final assignments was the argumentative essay. At this point, I fully understood how to input the MLA format, but struggled with components in this essay like in-text citations. I will mistakenly put the last name first. Other than that this essay dealt with two topics that will need to research, hen I take a stand and find multitudes of evidence that will logically support the overall claim. Although I felt connected to this topic, evidence was needed to help explain in an argument form why this stand is accurate. To add on the incorporation of logos, pathos and ethos was a part of this essay. The logos will be the evidence, and that will convince the reader to adopt your stance. During this essay avoiding logical fallacies is important. This was understandable by the time I was writing this, let me know that any claim, should have credibility, and should be balanced. Thus the argument I had needed to be reasonable. The argument had both sides, a counterclaim making the reader be aware of the two sides. The only issue through this essay was the source integration since it was hard to put in the source in between the sentence it sounded like a run on sentence. This essay after the edits help me see the bias parts in the essay. I learned how to interpret in my own words from an argument I believe in.

Throughout being FIQWS from the first day, I knew it was going to be a challenging experience but with be leaving with a knowledge of academic writing. These assignments needed more and more skills from the literacy narrative to the argumentative essay. They would get more challenging but what I will learn from the previous arguments I would implement it in the next one. The understanding of citation, argumentation, and the rhetorical situation grew and has improved my writing skills. This class affected the way I see how writing styles can affect how your argument is. This course helped me see how a college class and the work there is in is extensive.

                                                                                                     Sincerely Johanni Valerio