Wesley Dominguez

FIQWS 10105

December, 2019

Course Reflection

As this course comes to an end I find myself being proud of the work I have done. As I mentioned in my literacy narrative, I have always had trouble with writing. This course has helped me confront many challenges that I have faced before. I was able to learn different styles of writing through the different papers we have written. Also, something I feel that I have gotten better at is being able to start an essay and understand what information I should be including. However, due to my lifelong struggles with writing I must admit, I still have difficulty with citing and depending the essay style, tying all my ideas together. These issues have both improved over the course compared to how I felt about it before. I have noticed my progress in my literacy narrative, exploratory essay, and research analysis along with their feedback and comments.

My literacy narrative served as a self-reflection to face what I knew and did not know about writing, as well as what I was good at or needed to improve. I noticed with this essay that writing is easier for me when it is about something personal, a personal experience. This makes sense because I think of it as retelling a story of my own. Therefore, information flows easily. What I found most difficult about writing this essay was my grammar. On the plus side, with this essay I was able to understand and get better at making the reader relate with what they are reading and/or understand the point I was trying to make in my story. This was not the case, for my exploratory essay.

The Exploratory Essay was more challenging than the literacy narrative for me. I felt that I knew what I wanted to say but did not know how to say it. In my feedback I received a comment stating that I should explain some of my quotes more in depth, I agree. I had to include background information for some of the stories I mentioned. The information I wanted to tell the reader didn’t flow so easily.  Finishing this essay, as well as the course, helped me understand where in some essays I can add more and better explanations or information. On the other hand, something that I did improve in while writing the exploratory essay is my citing skills. Although they were not very good, I was able to find where to look for help and where to find sources. These are skills I did not have before taking the class and plan on improving. Also, I used my course book, The Norton Field Guide to Writing by Richard Bullock to write my works cited page.

After figuring out how looking for sources and citing worked I thought I would be able to execute the research analysis paper better than I did. It was the most difficult paper for me and it shows because I received a grade of an 80. I am still proud of this grade again, because writing is not my strength but also because I was able to learn a new essay style. I also learned more about citing and was able to use that skill for my next paper, the Research Analysis.

I am glad that the other papers were able to slowly guide me into starting the Research Analysis Paper. I say this because priorly I felt it was hard to obtain ideas for my papers. However, for my Research Analysis paper I had many ideas yet, did not organize them very well. What this paper has taught me is how to look for sources that back up the points I am trying to make. I used tools such as JSTOR and Google Scholar to look for sources that are reliable and could prove my thesis. For example, I was trying to point out that fairytales are deceiving. In my essay I knew I had to include sources that agreed with me or proved the deception of fairy tales. I could even explain how specific fairy tales stories were deceiving. Unfortunately, there were times I made my thesis unclear because I added information without much of an explanation. In my future papers I plan to explain each source more depth in order to make my point more clear. I feel that all my ideas were rushed into the paper but overall, learned a lot about the research process when collecting information to write the essay. 

Looking back at all my papers I realize that there is still a lot to learn and improve on when writing my papers, but it is possible because I have learned and improved so much already. This course has been very helpful in getting me to start formulating ideas and putting it on paper. The literacy narrative expanded my skills on organizing my paper and sequencing my thoughts. The exploratory essay introduced me to things about citing I did not know. Also, without this course I would have never tried improving the little I know, nor would I have ever been exposed to so many different styles of writing. The research analysis paper is a style of writing I was not familiar with and taught me how to find sources that back up my thesis. Overall in the class I notice that I have improved on getting a theme, thesis, and the research process of looking for sources. The things I hope to continue improving on in writing are my citations, in depth explanations, and the whole organization of the paper.