Sym Abdul-Hadi

Suzanne McCarthy

ENGW1111

6 December 2019

Unit 4: Final Reflection

I started this semester feeling fairly confident in my writing ability because I took english

classes in community college before transferring to Northeastern. However, there was still a

lingering feeling in the back of my mind that maybe I wasn't actually a good enough writer.

While I have written a lot for my previous english class. There were still several areas where I

was not comfortable with my writing, and the syllabus for this class did include a few things that

made me nervous. The thing that I felt most uncomfortable with was changing the tone and

audience of my writing. My usual writing tone works well for academic research papers such as

literature reviews; however, I was not as comfortable with more argumentative essays, or writing

to engage an audience.

Entering into this class my main goal was to get out of my comfort zone and write with a

variety of styles, and target audiences. I knew that this would involve taking advice from other

people, which I'm glad that this class focused on. I feel that I've gotten a lot of useful peer

review out of this class, more so than in the past. In this class the goal of peer review was

stressed to be to try to understand the ideas that a person was trying to convey with their

writing; then to try to point out where the ideas are failing to come across or need to be

elaborated on, or maybe suggest a different direction that could be interesting to look into. With

that in mind the other students were a huge help in guiding me out of my comfort zone in my

writing. With their help I was able to better formulate arguments, and find when my essays were

leading people to places that I didn't expect. I remember a time when my memoir was reviewed,

there was a moment when a classmate told me that they thought that a segment painted a great

picture of tactically gearing up to dumpster dive. That wasn't my original goal of that section, but
after getting that feedback I leaned into making that scene more vivid and comical. That wasn't

a tone I was comfortable using previously, but having someone tell me where they already saw

it and liked it made me feel better about using it purposefully. Peer review also went two ways, I

feel that I was able to give much better feedback then just correcting grammar (like I may have

in my last english class).

The argumentative essay is another place where I wasn't confident coming into the

class. it was my first essay for this class, so of course there is plenty that I would change about

it now. But one thing that I think I did well in that essay is defining my argument, and trying to

focus it to something more manageable then how it started — although looking back maybe it

could have used even more focus. Writing that essay while reading the text Essays and

Arguments really helped me explore new ways to write argumentative essays. The two main

things that I got out of the text were understanding how to define my argument to make it

digestible to a person who isn't me, and breaking away from a five-paragraph essay format. In

that essay I didn't just stick to making an introduction with a thesis, several argumentative

paragraphs, and a conclusion. Instead I had argument paragraphs, and follow them with

paragraphs that expands on the argument though examples to help make the arguments more

understandable. Still reflecting on that essay I feel that I could have done more to make my

argument less convoluted.

The bias in media assignment was something that I would have been more comfortable

with going into this class, still surprisingly to me I learned a lot by writing that essay. I feel that

that assignment has made me a more honest writer. It would have been very easy to make

broad sweeping claims in this essay that I couldn't substantiate through evidence. This is

another place where class discussions and the textbook helped me. The goal of this essay was

to not try to make assumptions, and then to fit whatever evidence I could find to fit those

assumptions. Instead I started my writing by just going through the articles and trying to find

what each of them was doing differently. Then I wrote the body of the essay with no introduction
or thesis in mind, because I wanted as little of my own biases to get in the way of writing this

essay. Using that method allowed me to just write whatever I saw the articles did differently, and

then draw my conclusions from that analysis.

I believe that this class has made me a more confident and versatile writer. I am able to

write essays with clear goals in mind. I am more able to identify when I need to get help, and

where I can get that help. This class brought me out of my comfort zone for multiple

assignments, which I found to be very rewarding. While outside of my comfort zone I learned to

utilize outside help. That one skill — more than any other that I've improved in this class —

makes me feel confident in my ability to do any type of writing that I may need to in my

academic career and beyond. Through this class I have grown a lot as a writer, and as a

scholar.