Emiliano Ramirez

ENC 1101

December 7, 2017

Final Draft

Self-Assessment

Since the first time that I stepped inside the classroom, my writing has only seen constant

progress. Im sincerely glad that I was able to transcend above the writing standards that high

school students are held to. Ive always had strong opinions about that useless system, and I was

finally able to let them be known to others in ENC 1101. However, this was just among the few

objectives that I had for this semester. My main goals were to meet and go well above the four

learning outcomes from UCF Writes.

Learning Outcome 1: Students will be able to use scholarly texts to support their writing goals.

My reading responses all semester were significantly long. At first, I did them just

because I wanted a grade for the assignment. But as I saw that I actually enjoyed doing the

readings and partaking in the discussions, I began extending the length of my responses so that

they included all of my thoughts. However, in the big assignments such as the first two papers, I

believed that even though they were quite descriptive that they couldve had even more

information. I did not write any more in those because I was fearing that I might be digressing

from the actual topic onto its branches, which has been something that Ive always done.

However, this did not stop me from including as much of my argument as possible for each

paper. For example, I believe my 3rd paper to be the best, not because it was the shortest with a
good grade, but because I was able to effectively sustain an argument and expand on how I

evolved from the problem. This is a big leap in the writing process for me because I can put

together a timeline of my progress as a writer and predict future trends about modification on my

writing abilities and drafting methods according to my career path.

Two of the terms that I learned in this semester that I am completely sure that will stick

with me for the rest of my life are Sponsors of Literacy and Intertextuality. These both are

the ones that I found most applicable to any writing. The theories behind these are not difficult to

grasp and once you do, they become unavoidable tools that you will have at your disposition

whenever you write something. Now Im able to argue with my parents that everything that I

know was because I got from them!

Learning Outcome 2 and 3: 2. Students will be able to describe and analyze writing processes

in order to flexibly adapt them to support their goals. 3. Students will learn how to adapt to

different writing contexts they need to address.

The views on writing that Ive adopted ever since the beginning have opened my eyes to

more writing styles and its applications. For example, I now try to visualize writing more as a

conversation than just words in a paper. As I mentioned in Paper 3, this is what has led me to

improve my communications skills overall with improving my writing - it allows me to expand

more easily on conversational topics. I am glad that this happened to me this semester, because I

will be able to give it a great use beyond the classroom. One example could be in my engineering

career; engineers are very sought after because of their soft skills and communication. From

those, derive skills such as teamwork, written communication, and leadership.

 Process of putting together Paper #2 (which talks about my engineering career and its

discourse community) was quite challenging for me; now that I was forced to look inside

myself and deduce how I was interacting with the discourse community that I am currently

involved with. It all began by me asking myself how I perceived the community before joining,

and how I do currently, now that I have much more experience with the discourse community at

a large scale and have a certain degree of authority over the topic.

My first paper was probably my best demonstration on the mastery of a writing context. I

was able to successfully manipulate the topic of Sponsors of Literacy so that it fit my writing

experience. Having a more thorough knowledge of the topic allowed me to explain how some

examples of my writing connect to the sponsors that I interact everyday with. For example, the

writing excerpt that I included in page 10 of paper #1 is a result of a sponsor of literacy. Writing

that piece of text was not mandatory, not even encouraged by my professor; but I took the time

out of class to write it because I felt influenced by the literacy sponsor that philosophy is it

encourages the reader to get involved in deep thought with the proposed argument. I just chose to

write it because I cant structure my ideas properly if they arent written down.

Learning Outcome 4: Students will consider how social, rhetorical, and technological contexts

shape writing conceptions, processes, rules, and learning.

Some of the readings that were the most meaningful to me in the process of stepping

away from the public school standardized writing system were Argument as a Conversation,

All Writing is Autobiographical, Rhetoric: Making Sense of Human Interactions and

Meaning-Making, The Rhetorical Situation, Intertextuality, and finally Decisions and

Revisions. These were meaningful in the way that some of them served as a reassurement of my

assumptions of how writing was beyond high school before even taking this class. Others, such
as Making Sense of Human Interactions were humbling to me because apart from dragging

me away from that process I came from, they forced me to look at writing in ways that I had

never even thought of before.

Overall, I believe that Ive immensely improved my writing throughout this semester, but

I still feel as if I was missing some vital component of writing. I always say that there is always

room for improvement no matter how much you practice. However, maybe Im taking this to an

extreme level here, because it might just be that I am yet to settle down on my own style of

writing, but that only pushes me to practice more; so its like an unending cycle of application

and studying that I will carry on with me well beyond my college career and into the professional

world.