Cover Letter

Phase 4 was an easy yet reflective phase. Being the last phase, it helped me learn and track my progression in reading and writing throughout all the other phases. Looking back at the phases helped me understand what areas of my writing and reading skills, they have helped. When I read over my language and literacy essay, peer profile, and research essay, I got to take advantage of the “time away” effect when it comes to editing my writing. Spending time away from the assignments helped me see the various errors and bad-sounding sentence structures I used in my assignments. In this way, I was able to improve a lot of my assignments’ sentence structure, especially in my Language and Literacy essay, from which I also picked out quotes to use in my self-assessment essay.

Furthermore, I was able to build on these edits through sentence-level editing when my peer read aloud my essay for me and edited each sentence. Through this, I was able to accomplish course outcome #3 which was to develop strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing. I really liked sentence-level editing because it really made me focus on making my self-assessment essay better one sentence at a time, which improved the overall quality of the essay. Another course outcome that I accomplished in this phase was course outcome #2 which was to analyze and in writing, and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations because when I read over my self-assessment essay, I was able to analyze whether my audience would find each part of my essay boring or interesting and I was able to make the choice of deleting certain paragraphs and rewriting them totally.

Honestly, even though the self-assessment essay was just a reflection it was hard to write because it was very simple. We were encouraged to make the self-assessment essay interesting but it was hard to do that when we had to meet a requirement of addressing and quoting course outcomes. While trying to address every single course outcome, eventually, I felt myself writing in a robotic manner and my paper being boring. 

Overall, this was the easiest phase of this English course as it was just reflecting on all my previous work and just a bit of editing. I have learned to strengthen my editing skills and to make my writing more interesting. I hope to use these editing skills in writing more papers in future English classes and beyond.

Self-Assessment Essay

“Transformative” is one word I would use to describe this semester of English. This semester of English transformed me as a writer, reader, and rhetorical thinker. This semester I have traversed a whole new style of writing. Writing personal pieces such as the language and literacy essay, journalistic pieces such as the peer profile, and research-based pieces such as the research paper allowed me to test out a plethora of writing skills that I didn’t know I had. This semester of writing made me a better writer overall because of the new skills that I learned in each phase. Firstly, in phase 1, I was able to understand the concepts of ethos, pathos, and logos. In my Phase 1 language and literacy essay, I used logos to explain why I decided to start a friendship with Ohan in the first place. In my language and literacy essay, I stated, “I took particular interest in him because he looked like me: brown skin and dark black hair. I had a gut feeling he was Bengali.” Through my use of logos, I was able to introduce my interaction with Ohan, which was the main point of the assignment. With this, I completed Course Learning Outcome #4, which was to “recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies.” I completed this course outcome by understanding logos, ethos, and pathos, and then using it in my language and literacy narrative. 

In addition, reading works such as “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan and “3 Ways to Speak English” by Jamila Lyiscott enabled me to accomplish the first outcome of the course, which was to investigate the ways in which attitudes toward linguistic standards can either empower or oppress language users. By reading such works of literature, I was able to gain an understanding of the challenges that other people face while attempting to communicate in English and how people frequently experience feelings of oppression as a result of this. Furthermore, presenting the assignment to the class with the aid of visual models was a great learning experience for me as well. I had previously given presentations in class; however, I had never presented something personal to the class before, so I was pretty nervous. However, I was able to overcome my nervousness when I heard some of the other presentations and realized that my story was quite similar to mine and that we all had quite the same journey with language. 

In Phase 2, I learned the art of interviewing through the Dave Chapelle and Jay Z interview clips I was shown. Those clips inspired me to interview my peers with meaningful questions that answered many questions at once and gave me more material to write about in my peer profile. As soon as it was time for me to write the peer profile, I was anxious once more since I was unsure of how to write a “profile,” which is a type of writing that is typically found in magazines. Because I was under the impression that I had sufficient creativity, I searched the internet for samples of “profiles” that were published in magazines in order to get some ideas to work with. Following that, I produced my peer profile, concentrating solely on the major occasions that occurred throughout my peer’s time spent learning a language. Not only was it a pleasant and unique experience to conduct interviews during phase 2, but it was also an excellent experience to respond to questions that were asked during interviews. I was able to express myself through the responses that I provided to my peers, and it is without a doubt that I embellished certain aspects of my responses in order to provide my peers with the opportunity to compose an engaging peer profile about someone like me. Writing the peer profile allowed me to accomplish Course Outcome #2 in that I was able to “explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations,” by reading my peer’s language and literacy essays and then analyzing their usage of rhetorical strategies in my peer profile. 

Moving on to Phase 3, I can say it was the hardest phase because of the length and time required to write a good research paper. I was at first overwhelmed by the idea of choosing a topic and sticking to it.I was a little concerned that I wouldn’t be able to locate sources that were of sufficient quality for my paper, and that I would have to make a significant amount of effort to stretch out my words in order to meet the page restriction. On the other hand, I was provided with a variety of resources, such as JSTOR and Google Scholar, which made it simple for me to locate research journals and articles. Furthermore, I was able to locate proof to back up the statements that I made in the research paper. Moreover, through the research process to find evidence for my language and unity paper, I completed Course Outcome #5, which was to “Understand and use print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences.” My research abilities were able to be practiced and improved as a result of the research paper that I had to write. Through the process of learning from my errors and refining my searches, I was able to obtain the specific kinds of articles and journals that I was seeking for in order to pique the attention of my audience. In addition, the process of writing and revising the research paper enabled me to fulfill course outcome number three. This was because the peer reviews of the essay enabled me to “develop strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing.” As a result, not only was I able to edit my own paper, but I was also able to assist in the correction of my fellow student’s research paper. 

One aspect that I felt went untouched was the presentation part. I am naturally a very bad presenter so I felt like only one presentation in this whole course helped little in helping to improve my presentation skills. One thing that could have been done was to make us interview our peers in front of the class so that we have an audience and it felt like a TV interview. That way I could have worked on my presentation skills while the entire class could get a chance to understand their peer’s rhetorical strategies.

In conclusion, this semester of English was unlike any English class that I had been in before. Instead of reading famous books, we read short non-fiction texts from authors and speakers that help us relate to language. Furthermore, the focus on language made me discover a lot about myself and I hope to carry the writing and analyzing skills I have learned in this class onto future English courses.