Everything in life is a learning process and so it is developing your writing skills. If there was a class that I scared failing at the beginning of this semester, Fall 2018, was composition writing, FIQWS, because I have never consider myself a good writer and because I am an ESL student which would not make it easier for me. Despite my anxiety for this class, day after day I realized that my writing skills are improving, and I learned so many beneficial strategies such as: purpose, genre, media/design, audience, exigence, and finding reliable and credible sources, to write any kind of paper. Writing for different genres, Literacy Narrative, Poetic Response, Research Critical Analysis, and free write, helped me to develop and improve my writing skills by putting everything I learned throughout the semester in a paper. I can confidently say that throughout this semester I have grown so much as a writer in multiple areas. 

If I compare my first assignment for this class, Literacy Narrative “Lost in My Mind’s Labyrinth”, with my last and final assignment for the class, Research Critical Analysis “In Search of Supergirl”, not only me but everyone who reads them will recognize the huge difference between them. I prefer to consider the Literacy Narrative as an experiment assignment because it was the first college paper that I wrote, and I did not know how to address many rhetorical strategies and devices. I remember struggling with persuading the purpose of my Narrative to the audience and finding and providing the most vivid details to get the readers’ attention. My sentences were very simple and did not contain too much explanation, because even though it was a Narrative, I still had to analyze the meaning of each detail and quote and tell the audience why they are important. However, the Research Critical Analysis, “In Search of Supergirl”, reveals, I believe, everything I learned in this course. I tried to state a clear and persuasive thesis to my audience, my professors, Supergirl’s fans, and everyone who is interested to know more about the comics. I chose the most vivid evidences, citing them with the MLA format, to prove my point and I explained each of them in depth to support my thesis. I even created a counter argument and respectfully argued why I disagree with the writer.  

Locating and choosing research sources to support or disagree with my claims was one of the hardest but also the most advantageous thing I learned in this course. It is very important to use the most reliable and credible sources on your paper. Knowing who the author is, when it was published, what organization/website published it, and if it is a scholarly article or not help to strengthen your paper. In all my papers I tried to find accurate and credible sources and to do it I used library’s databases to find academic journal articles, reviews and archives. I also used Internet Websites to find articles to support my thesis but always checking who the author is, the timeline, if the site is credible, and if it has any possible bias. 

If I can choose one assignment from everything I have done this whole semester is the Poetic Response Paper. The three poems, “My Brother and I,” “Cupa e Babagjyshit,” and “Stranger,” reveal my purest feelings and thoughts toward different topic, and I tried to persuade them to the audience as good as I could. I enjoyed everything about this assignment, long hours of thinking what to write in only one line, using the right vocabulary, finding a title to attract attention and trying to end the poems in the most powerful way. Each of the poems is connected to me in a way or another and every word on them came from the heart. The ability of choosing my own genre for the poems, the rhyme scheme, and using multiple types of figurative language made this assignment my favorite. 

The use of technology, Blackboard, email, and Internet was a key term on writing my papers. Through the usage of Internet, I found endless sources that would strengthen my claims, the email kept me in touch with my professor if I had any question, and through the Blackboard I received feedback from my professor on my drafts, which were more useful than I ever thought on improving my papers. The use of Internet was also useful for helping me with the inside citations, Works Cited page, and with my Annotated Bibliography where I summarized some possible sources for my Research Critical Analysis paper and explained how I will connect the given information on the sources with my thesis. Peer Reviews were something else that I appreciated the most from this course because having my group members, a part of the audience, telling me their opinion regarding my drafts and suggesting me what I should consider, and fix was very helpful. 

Free Write at the beginning of each class period was another valuable strategy from my professor because I was able to write everything that came in my mind at the moment regarding a specific topic. By practicing it in class, writing down random things for a specific topic, helped me in all my assignments because I would write in a scratch paper everything that crossed my mind for the given topic, and I would later go over and select the most useful ideas and develop them more, by turning them into claims, background information and supporting details. 

Drafting is the key for a well written paper! I never realized it until my professors made us write at least two drafts for each assignment. Every time I would go over my first, second, or third draft I would find mistakes, unclear sentences, I would replace repetitive words with their synonyms, and even cross out or redo a whole paragraph by providing more evidences and analysis. By rereading and rewriting my drafts I was able to put every rhetorical device that I was missing in, removing unnecessary information, and reorganize my ideas using the professors’ feedback and the received peer reviews.  

Citing, quoting, analyzing, writing for different genres, and for an unknown audience are all strategies I have learned upon this semester. All these strategies assisted in improving my lexicon in writing and will help me to write different papers throughout my college experience. Even though it has been a long journey, the amount of strategies and abilities that I gained is undoubtful and very beneficial to my writing skills.

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