Writing is an important part of our human culture and history and it is one of the easiest ways to express ourselves. Back in the days of the neanderthals when they only drew on walls, it was very difficult to truly understand what was going on during their times and we had to make educated guesses to think about what they did. It was only when we started being able to put pen to paper are articulate our words that we are a species were able to fully explain how we think. To me, writing is all about expressing what you believe and putting it into words. When you want to express how you feel about gentrification, you will use strong words like turmoil or miserable to let the reader understand that you disagree with the practice. Writing alone has allowed us to do this and it is why it is so important to learn about it. Throughout the semester we were given tasks and goals that we had to try to learn to help further our writing skills and I feel like I have done I best I could at tackling this task head-on.

One of my goals for the semester was to acknowledge mine and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources and draw on those resources to develop a rhetorical sensibility. What this essentially means is that throughout the semester I had to present through my essay that I understood how to find articles related to my essay topic and use them to develop my thesis. I feel like I can best represent this through my first essay. In the opinion editorial essay, the most important thing to do to help elaborate on my opinion was to find articles that supported what I wanted the reader to believe. My opinion in my op-ed essay was that gentrification was a bad thing and it ruins the lives of those it touches. At one point in the essay, when talking about “Gentrification has only caused pain and turmoil amongst the common man”, I use a statistic from the Urban Displacement Project that stated, “about one in five neighborhoods in the 31-county New York metropolitan area is experiencing gentrification or displacement”. Using these statistics in response to my own argument has allowed me to show off how I am able to get resources from the internet to help develop my point and draw from them to give myself credibility from the reader. Now, this wasn’t the only time I have done this as I had to draw from other sources in all of my essays throughout the semester but this was one of the best representations that show off I understand this task for the semester.

Another task for this semester was to enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment. I feel like this is where I personally struggled throughout the semester and in general throughout my entire school career. I have never been a big fan of doing drafts and the process that always came along with it. After spending hours on your first draft, you then need to edit your, and usually, someone else’s, draft and then make a final draft that should be different from the first draft. Whenever I write essays I prefer to make it in one shot and not look back. That is actually what I am doing right his moment while writing this essay. I do check for basic things like spelling and grammar but when it comes to the actual content of the essay, whether I read it once or a hundred times whatever I decided to write that first time also tends to sound good to me. When it comes to editing other people’s drafts, I never know what to look for so I end up just saying whatever comes to my mind when first reading the essay. I usually tell them to edit some words here and there to help the essay flow more smoothly but honestly, I doubt these people take my thoughts seriously anyway so I just don’t care to do them. This semester I only wrote one actual draft that ended up being changed for the final submission. For my first essay, the actual content in the essay itself was really good in my opinion but the issue the came in, and the reason I had to edit the draft, was that the reflection that comes along with all the essays had no actual content from the essay itself. I ended up giving lackluster responses in an attempt to get the reflection over with but it ended up making me do more work in the end with how I needed to edit it later on. This was a good learning experience for me and it really did help with the other 2 essays that came after. I learned from my mistake of just trying to finish my draft fast so I could submit it faster and instead I just took my time and made a good first attempt essay and wouldn’t need any real edits. I feel like in a sense I did learn to enhance strategies for the draft but the strategy was to make a good enough essay where the draft would also be the final submission.

Our third task for the semester was to negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of the genre, medium, and rhetorical situation. This topic and first introduced in the first essay, but it was still very prevalent throughout the two following essays. Every essay needs to have a target audience so that you know who to write for and to help these readers understand the essay more. A big task for essay 1 was to pick a news channel and write as if you were going to send it to them. This was one part of the medium and also genre for the essay. I also had to do the same thing for the second and third essays as well. In the second essay, I created a train station advertisement and I did this to help me develop my topic. The goal of the visual essay was to show the before and after of gentrification and what it can do to people so when I decided on the medium to be an advertisement it did help. My logic was that more likely than not if you are being gentrified you will wind up at some point on a train since people in this situation don’t tend to be able to afford cars and parking. Using this logic is very important so you know how you be writing your essays and it will help you reach who you want when it comes to who reads the essay.

Our fourth task for the semester was to develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of the writing processes. I can say right now that I was not the best at this process and I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed anything that had to do with this either. After making our drafts, which I already said earlier that I hated, we had to review other people’s drafts and edit them. For the first and second essays and I did this but only because it was required. I don’t really believe I was ever very helpful when I gave people the advice, so if I had the choice I just wouldn’t have given it. This is something that I do need to work on but I just don’t think it’s something that I actually want to fix. This is not something on the top of my list that I think I need to work on compared to the rest of the tasks needed for the semester.

Our fifth task for the semester was to engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond. My understanding of this task was that we needed to be proficient in different forms of writing genres across different topics to be able to give some variety in how we write. I think the 3 essays were a perfect representation of this. In the first essay, we had to do a pitch for a new channel and try to write an article as if it was picked straight from the news channel themselves. This is a perfect skill to learn if you ever wanted to be a journalist or a blogger one day. Never hurts to know more than less when it comes to more forms of writing. Our second assignment had us creating pictures and images along with words to create some sort of advertisement or poster. I am not the most creative person in the world but I did find this fun. To create my advertisement on gentrification I used some simple photoshop and this helped me be more engaged in my essay and just made the whole experience more enjoyable. And for the third essay, we had to write up a critical analysis research paper. I decided on analyzing a short film which was the first time I ever used any sort of video as a piece of my essay. I usually liked to stick with only articles so this made the whole process something new for me as a whole. With all these different essays that we had to write, how wouldn’t you be able to learn some different genres of writing?

Our sixth task for the semester was to formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing. This was something that I decided to stay consistent with throughout the semester. I could have spoken about a wider range of topics from the BLM movement to climate change but instead, I decided to stick with the only gentrification and mainly the concept of it being a bad thing. Staying with only one topic throughout the semester allowed me to focus on how I could articulate my stance the best. Staying with only one topic, it made it very simple to complete this task and I do feel like it gave me a better understanding of the different ways one person can articulate their ideas in different ways.

Our seventh task for the semester was to practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects. This is something that I didn’t attempt to get better with I thought it would have been far easier to stay with just google chrome so I did not even bother with all the Libraries and databases since I just felt like it was extra work that I did need in my essays. It wouldn’t make a difference to me or the reader as long as I am able to get my point across well. My essay 3 reflection explains perfectly what my process was when it came to finding articles and information. In the reflection I wrote, “While I was analyzing the film I picked parts that focused on the effects of gentrification. For example, when I picked 4:35-4:47, I focused on the fact that the film director focused on the homeless man in a way to show what can happen from gentrification. Once I found this, and this is the thing I did for all 3 of the other topics, I just looked up gentrification and homelessness”. Using basic keywords is all I need to find the perfect article for my essays. I do think I completed this task for the semester I just don’t think it to the extent that I should have gone.

Our eighth and last task for the semester was to strengthen your source use practices. I have been writing essays for a very long time but I only recently started with the MLA format. The process of finding how to in text cite was indeed a process but not a difficult one. All I really had to do was look up how to do in-text citations and then transfer what it said over to my actual essay. One example of this was in my third essay. I had never needed to cite a video before in an MLA format essay so I had to check online how to do it. I found out that I needed specific times from the video such as (1:10-1:25) and then explain what occurred in this timeframe. I wouldn’t really say that this process evolved very much throughout the year. No matter what, I always seemed to forget how to do MLA citation so I just wound up looking it up. Even after doing over 10 essays in MLA format this year, I still always seemed to forget. While writing this paragraph I did seem to remember a little better on how to in-text citations so maybe I did improve on this just a little. Overall I would say that I improved on my source use practices from the beginning of the semester to the end and I can only see it getting better.

Over the course of the semester, I feel like I have grown not only as a writer but as a person overall. This class has taught me how to grow as a writer by exposing me to various genres. 

I’ve also made a personal choice to use the same topic for all of these assignments which gave a good point of comparison between all the assignments and showed me how the type of writing which is chosen can have an effect on the message conveyed to the audience, as well as the type of audience that is being reached and how the information being utilized must be molded depending on the writing style chosen. From the op-ed to the visual essays and the critical analysis, it has allowed me to develop and practice my skills even further than it was before I entered this class.