Introduction / Self Assessment Essay

Dear Professor, Daniella Carr

Throughout my semester in Engl 21007, I have learned a lot. Whether it ranged from proposals to understanding the difference between exigence and purpose there were a lot of things I’ve learned. Throughout this semester, I believe I have successfully achieved all eight-course learning outcomes. However, this accomplishment was a gradual process, marked by many challenges as I learned how these outcomes and rhetorical elements could enhance my writing. While I was already familiar with some rhetorical elements from English 110, others, like exigence, were new to me and took time to fully grasp. Once I understood how to connect exigence with the purpose and audience of a piece, it became easier to use all rhetorical elements to analyze and compose within any genre.

This course transformed my concept of writing from a creative outlet for expressing thoughts and emotions into a tactical tool for influencing action. By effectively connecting with an audience, writing can persuade or inform them, driving the desired reaction or action. Such as my persuasive memo, it took some time to get it right, but through a lot of peer revisions and comments left by my professor, I was eventually done. The persuasive memo taught me the basics of rhetorical elements. I vividly remember learning the most about audience as I could never get it right, apparently, it was too vague at times, and in I decided to become more specific with my chosen audience. My chosen audience at the very beginning was the entire school executive board. However, through many revisions and comments, I’ve learned that when writing a proposal of any sort it’s best to address the audience specifically, which I addressed City College President  Dr. Vincent Boudreau and sports athletic director Steve Macias to add a sports complex into our school campus.

When it came to learning the course learning objectives, there were three major assignments that were given that really helped me understand the course learning objectives. The group proposal helped with collaboration and leveraging each other’s unique contributions for each project. Through interacting with our peers, we were able to learn and evaluate the knowledge and skills each person brought to the table. These interactions were crucial for completing tasks such as the lab report, group proposal project, and job posting assignment. It also taught me how the third-course learning outcome allowed us to remain focused on our work and its message, which is extremely important in engineering-related work. For example, in our Proposal, we needed to ensure our audience believed our plan was effective and worth investing in. To achieve this, we used our medium, stance, exigence, and more to convince them of our work’s promise. This was shown through the persuasive tone of our writing and the content we included to make our plan appealing.

One of the things that I can’t and won’t forget about this semester was the amount of peer review and revisions that were made, this helped me begin a habit of always asking my partners to revise my work to make sure the work that I output is up to standards. An example of this would be our group proposals, in the early stages of our group proposal we originally thought of the idea of E-Waste. The issue with the topic we chose was that it was very difficult to meet the criteria that we needed to meet in order to talk about it. We could not relate it to specific natural disasters that was directly affected by it, we also could not explain why it was a sustainability issue. After multiple failed attempts and rejection of our topic on E-Waste, we treaded for a new idea and idea that is more sustainable. We decided to create a proposal for an app called Heat Wave. All though this was a good idea we still had to make revisions to the group proposal in general.

All in all, this semester was very informative and very helpful in teaching me things that I now know I need as I strive to pursue a career in engineering. Writing proposals, technical descriptions, resumes, job postings, working in a team in general. It has all been very helpful, as it helps me bring a more professional approach to my career.