This semester I got a chance to experience making different pieces of writing, for example, the op-ed essay assignment. I had never written an op-ed before, but the steps we took in class with the professor made the assignment seem more accomplishable. Writing is the act of searching for information to piece together your words and the words of other authors to send a message to the reader. Most of the essays in this course involved lots of research, especially the final conference essay, which I used five sources in. This semester I feel like I got better at researching and especially at finding peer-reviewed sources. I struggled a lot less with the research than I did last semester. Writing is a multi-step process, and you have to put time into each step. I feel like I’ve realized how important it is to break the process of writing an essay into smaller parts.

Throughout the semester I got to talk to some of the people in class and get to know more about their backgrounds and even the stereotypes they feel are sometimes pushed on them. The community essay was specifically good for this, and it helped me develop my own essay as someone who feels like they struggle to feel like they are part of a community. I felt like I was going to have a hard time writing that essay, but when we did the peer review and I got to read some of my classmates’ essays, I got a better understanding of my own experiences as a member of my communities. The presentations of the conference papers also allowed us to get to know each other on a deeper level, since I feel like most people wrote about something they cared about, and when they were presenting, you could tell it’s something deeper to them than just a topic. 

I definitely feel like my strategies for drafting have improved throughout this course, and like I mentioned, I think the Op-Ed played a big role in this. The paper that showed us step-by-step how to write an op-ed was incredibly helpful. I also feel like my reading skills have developed as well. The stories from Her Body and Other Parties went deeper than the surface most of the time, and I had to read the stories multiple times to even understand them on a surface level. The group-led discussions also forced me to try and understand the story as best I could so I could come up with some good questions, forcing me to read the story multiple times. The group-led discussion also helped me engage in the collaborative and social aspects of the writing process because I got to talk to my classmates about the story, and we worked together to figure out some questions that we had, and together we came to a better understanding of the story we had to work on.

I was able to negotiate my own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situations. I think although we did write different kinds of essays and worked on the blog post, which also included audio or video sometimes, I was able to complete the assignments sufficiently. I read the assignments thoroughly so I could better understand what was being asked of me and how I could present that to my audience. I was also able to engage in multimodal composing on the CUNY Commons site. Looking for music, videos, or pictures that would go well with my writing was very fun and something I don’t think I’ve been able to do many times. This actually made me want to take videos of things I feel fit some of my journal entries. I enjoyed writing and reading multiple genres this semester; it kept the assignments from being repetitive, and it also helped broaden my writing. 

I was very good at formulating and articulating a stance through and in my writing. I feel like I did a good job at this in my conference final paper. Even though the media aspect of the paper was important, I still wanted to bring up how damaging to the queer community queer films can be. The representation of queer people in film is something I care very much about, so it was hard not to talk about it when the spotlight was already on the topic of queer films. I also feel like I did great at articulating my stance in the community essay and the op-ed; since I was writing about something I feel deeply about, it was hard not to state my stance and defend it as best I could. I got to practice using various library sources and the internet during the conference paper and the op-ed that would help me develop my points and push my ideas on the topic. I believe I have become better at evaluating my sources and finding where they would fit best in my works.

This course was different from the writing course I took last semester. I feel like that was because we didn’t have such a range of genres; we mainly focused on non-fiction writing, which I really love, but this semester I really liked writing about topics that matter to me on a deeper level. The op-ed was a great way to inform myself about the dangers my community is going through, and it also helped me realize how I can also help spread helpful information on topics like ICE. I really liked how much I got to explore this semester. For me, writing is a way to inform others, bring people together, and create new ideas. I definitely did a lot of that during this course.