Reflection In Academic Writing

Writing is something I always struggled with throughout my academic career. Whether it is for the English class or any other liberal arts class, I have a tendency to deviate from the main task of writing. This semester I took a FIQWS Composition class which helped me explore the unexplored areas of my academic writing. There are three main essays Literacy narrative, exploratory essay and Critical Researched analysis each improved my writing tremendously. In the first day of class, I was surprised to see the amount of work is expected from me because there were only three major essays and three reflections. I thought the workload would not be so intense because of the limited assignments. However, as the Semester has progressed, the work required

In the reflections, we had to choose two rhetorical terms and discuss how we used the terms in our writing pieces. I learned the meaning application of the terms such as exigence, audience, stance, purpose and genre. In my reflections I mostly used audience and purpose because they were well suited for context of my papers. However, I also used exigence in my literacy narrative reflection because my background and academic experience promoted to me write about the struggles of the immigrant students. Similarly, I learned rhetorical strategies such ethos, logos and pathos and their usages in academic writing. In the final research paper, I tried to make use of the three strategies to make my paper more appealing to the readers. We did exercise in class in which we had to choose a rhetorical strategies that we think we are weak in and write a paragraph using the rhetorical strategy. I wrote about logos and found the exercise extremely useful in implementing the skills into the

In writing this essay, I struggled in following the instructions. In the rough draft, my paper was mostly composed of decline in quality of life and housing in Harlem. I read nine articles from the course packet that address the pre-era of gentrification and spent most of time of essay discussing the housing conditions and health problems. In doing so, I lost the control and flow of my ideas, thus staying away from my thesis. Thanks to Professor Poltrack feedback, I managed to focus on one article and convey the overall message more effectively. In this essay, I also made use of print technologies by attaching a photographed evidence of gentrification. This made my piece stronger because it gave the readers a visual of how gentrification is affecting the long term Harlemites. In both the research paper and exploratory essay, I learned the systematic application of citation through citation tools and MLA regulations. For both essays, I had work cited page in MLA-8 format. The Purdue Owl website helped me learn the citation rules while the databases allowed me to select citation style and automatically generate citation for particular