Abstract

In my self-assessment essay, I elaborate on how I have and have not enhanced the class learning objectives in the essays that I wrote during the semester, as well as the things that I might have very nicely improved when drafting and making final edits to my essays. I reflect mostly on how I accomplished some of the objectives due to the collaborative side I was very well situated when developing interview questions, making my observations, and making sure that in these I focused on my person or place and not much on myself thoughts and feelings.

Self-Assessment Essay

When I write in my personal journal, I do not write in a very sophisticated or scholarly way as I think many people also don’t do which I believe makes me a good writer when I am given the chance to free write in a way that I need to put my voice on paper. During the semester I wrote two essays that required me to interview an individual and write about what I learned from them and my thoughts on the things that they informed me of and another where I had to observe, do research and write using my field notes and sources found. The first one was the peer interview essay, where I interviewed someone who I was paired with in class and had never met before. I was responsible in creating questions for my interview and making sure that they weren’t mostly short answered, and I got into depth of who this person was, came from, and something that they went through that has had a great impact on their life that I could write about. The transcultural interview essay was also something similar, but instead of me finding something impactful from the interview I had to come up with a current situation, in specific how economy in the Dominican Republic affects education, and create questions based on that topic that dd not begin very straight forward but with an informal conversation at first on typical living conditions. Lastly, for the sense of observation essay I also chose what topic and I wanted to write about. I needed to conduct an observation to the community I chose and use my field notes of this place and academic sources I found based on the topic to put together a nice paper. These essays were given in different times of the semester which makes them great for me to assess my writing development over these few months and that I have achieved some of the course learning objectives.

When it comes to the learning objectives, I could say that in these three essays I have repeatedly applied these in order to developed well written papers. For example, in my peer interview and transcultural essay I interviewed two individuals who were raised in a different area than me and have somewhat different cultural aspects. In my peer interview I spoke with Kevin, a classmate, who migrated from Jamaica to the United States and has a strong Jamaican culture, similarly in my transcultural essay I interviewed my cousin who does not lived or traveled to any other place but the Dominican Republic all her life. I have used their collaboratives answers in order to develop rhetorical sensibility when writing about those thigs that have an impact in their lives from a long time ago. As of for my field site observation essay, where I observed my past high school and how they were doing after the reopening of schools with coronavirus still around, I also prepared for an interview with a students in order to have a strong primary source. Differently from my peer interview and my transcultural essay, I was able to take a hold in the practice of using various library sources and the internet to help find other strong documents, as well as being more precise in choosing sources that make my arguments stronger by having to read a source and analyze it to make sure that it added something new to my paper, and created somewhat of a strong foundation to the information I was able to obtain from my interview and my field observation around the school. After writing these papers I realized that putting your own voice and understanding on papers is just as important as writing in an analytical way because it adds feelings to your paper, and it helps stand out you persons feelings or a feeling you get from a place. Usually when assigned a paper we tend to believe that the information we are able to find and provide is the most important thing, however information without a voice does not show our readers feelings for the topic just a point of view of what someone or something is. This is why in my essays I developed a tendency to state in what tone my interviewees expressed themselves such as “his voice was very calm”, “she does not feel comfortable leaving her daughter”. Further in my essay, I also decided to write of what realizations and ideas I delt with while I listened to their confessions/answers such as “we only know how important these things are in our life until…”, “I remember that…” and “the problem I noticed…”.

Some of the things that I was not able to spend enough time was in formulating and articulating a stance through and in my writing, engaging in genre analysis and multimodal composing, and negotiating my writing goals and audience expectations. I guess I was more into the overall collaborative area of the class rather than personal acquisitions within my writing experience. I was able to achieve a personal goal I had at the beginning of the semester, which was being able to make conversations where I do not focus on me or on other topics while trying to ask questions and have smooth conversations. Regardless of achieving my personal goal in this class, I am interested in being able to negotiate my writing goals and audience expectations. I am not sure how that would specifically look like, but I have the idea of being straight forward with my interviewee on what I want from them and possibly doing some research of my own that could possibly guide me on how I can guide an interview or conversation to the ideas that I want to hear.