Abstract
Below is my self-reflection on my progress in the course, over the semester
Tylor Cheng
Professor Sara A. Jacobson
ENGL 21007
Math 21st, 2021
Self-Reflection Essay
Over the course of this semester, my academic writing skill was challenged in multiple ways. There were new formats of style that I had to learn and follow as well as different restrictions that were implemented on me. Throughout this self-reflection, I shall address certain challenges and objectives and whether I managed to overcome them as well as the way I managed to overcome them if I did. The first-course learning objective is “Acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility.” How I interpret this is by seeing my and my peer’s current linguistic skill as a tool and using it to help develop the tone of my works. To answer this objective, I did manage to achieve this, via feedback and peer observation. Early on my sense of tone informality in academic works was very poor and often how I approached goals were not up to academic standards, as I would sound informal using vocabulary that did not mimic the required one.
However, as the semester progressed using feedback from my professors, I was able to understand the responsibilities required of me and adjusted my formality and tone accordingly. By observing my peers, I was also able to grasp how to present myself according in writing as I could observe the professional standard that they had set for me. One example of this was the first drafts that were composed early on, these drafts were usually of poor quality and were meant as a rough outline of how our polished version was expected to be. The final drafts themselves even served as an example for this as we would receive even more feedback detailing improvements that could be made on future works. In addition to this feedback we, ourselves would have to compose a self-reflection, similarly to this current one being written now, where we would describe our opinions on the final work, as well as improvements that we thought could be focused on.
The second learning objective “Enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment” focuses on self-improvement regarding those skills. In that regard, I can say with a high degree of certainty that I have achieved this goal. Over the semester these improvements were noticeable as I continued to work on given assignments. A big part in this self-improvement could be attributed to, the self-reflections as we were able to pinpoint improvements that could be made on future writings, and once the time came, able to implement these improvements into them. As we continued to do more academic writings, we would apply these changes as second nature and the improvements would stack.
An example of this could be the quality of my first officially submitted academic writing my “Lab Report” compared to my final one “Engineering Proposal” granted the latter one was a group work, but my peers and I were able to incorporate all our knowledge and improvements into one collaborative project. The third-course objective “Negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium and rhetorical situation.” For this objective, although I would say I achieved it, I admittedly think that I did not develop as well on this topic. The reason being that although my academic writing skills informality, tone, and grammar have improved my writing style has not changed much from the beginning.
Whether this is because the improvements are very minuscule or because I incorporated them unconsciously, I could not say for certain. However, I will say that I am now more aware of the end goals of my writing and audience, as opposed to writing something and thinking of the end goals along the way. I am also more consciously aware of my audience and will take into more consideration their goals and how I should structure my works to cooperate with theirs. The fourth-course objective is “Develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.” To my understanding, this one deals with developing stronger collaborative skills, and I would say that from the beginning this skill has not changed much, at least compared to my previous experiences.
Compared to other semesters at the college, this course deals less with improving writing skills collaboratively than others. I would say the focus at least on the collaborative aspect is on pooling all our skills now to complete a project. However collaboratively improving academic skills is almost nonexistent in my opinion, as all the assignments were more individual-focused and more student-professor-based. Peer review or the like was almost nonexistent aside from the few zoom breakrooms, where a few lines of discussions would occur and almost right afterward would be silent for the rest of the time. Outside of classes, slightly more discussions would occur mainly about assignments, but aside from that, this was the entire social writing aspect of the class, so I would say that ultimately this goal was not as successful as it could be.
The fifth-course objective “Engage in genre analysis and multimode composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary context and beyond.” My interpretation of this is exploring a different type of academic literature and analyzing them to see how the academic standards are. An example of this type of learning is our Lab report analysis assignments, where we were tasked with comparing a set of lab reports and seeing how they compared to both each other and the standards set by our textbook. I would say I accomplished this objective quite well as over the semester we review not just lab reports but several types of engineering literature as well as their standards in both the academic setting, but also the commercial setting. These include not just the lab reports, but also technical descriptions, as well as item breakdowns.
During these types of works, we had to analyze several pieces we chose and see what at their core made them a candidate for their category. In the lab reports, we analyzed their multiple sections as well as how each section was dedicated to furthering the legitimacy of their findings, whether it aligned with their original intentions or not, something akin to honest and ethics. In the technical descriptions, we analyze how a detailed description of the item’s functionality improved the conciseness of the item itself as well as user useability. These abilities learned do not have to apply just to these few academic types of literature, but as they were the ones assigned it is much easier to highlight these few.
The next objective “Formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing” deals with having an objective in mind when composing work and supporting it with evidence throughout. Admittedly my methods involving this have not changed much, as for the most part I find it works, and very rarely do issues arise with it. This is also a basic one that was ingrained from an early age with the mindset “have a goal in mind” and was adapted with supporting evidence to fit into academic writing. So not much has changed in the way of this goal, although it is a very fundamental one. The seventh-course objective involved us gaining insight on using certified academic databases to source the evidence for our research claims. Overall, I would say things here have improved a little bit as I both learned about and use databases more and more.
The major work involving this would be again the Lab report analysis as we were required to source 2 lab reports and analyze them. The other part involving the internet did not improve as much as I had a large amount of experience, to begin with when dealing with researching. However, finding more niche types of research was a bit more involved and time-intensive compared to general search engines. The last course objectives revolve around said sources from before and strongly integrating them into your work. I would say that this field has improved as academic writing is both research and evidence intensive require most claims made by the individual to back it up with some sort of evidence. This was notable in works such as the lab report analysis where we had to make claims we observed and use the labs themselves as sources.
Overall, I have noticed my usage of any sort of evidence such as paraphrasing or quotes increase, not drastically but to a noticeable degree, along with the reliability of such things going up as well. The last thing being discussed would be my perception of what writing is and how my thought has changed as the semester went on. My perception of what writing is has perhaps changed very little, I still see writing as a means of communicating with others, your beliefs a sort of expression of yourself or to share findings of a research, but I can also see writing as a way of self-improvement, as with other things over time you can improve on, your abilities bit by bit.
In conclusion overall, I would say I achieve most of the writing objectives and developed them in some way or form. I would also say my stance on writing has not changed much from the beginning as writing is a tool that can be used, however so the user desires, in any shape or form.
