A CLOSED CHAPTER HAS OPENED DOORS

To what extent have I achieved the course learning objectives this semester? Looking back on the semester, I can see how much I’ve progressed as an English writer. Every class pushed me out of my comfort zone and pushed me beyond my original writing skills. During the semester, we discovered that language attitudes and standards may empower, oppress, and hierarchically position languages and the people who speak to them. I discovered how crucial it is to make an effort to be receptive to interacting with people from various linguistic and cultural backgrounds. One of the main things I appreciated about this class was the diversity of books and authors we read. Jumping from Amy Tan, learning about a Chinese American author who wrote about her mother’s struggles to speak English fluently. Tan’s creative essay Mother Tongue allowed us to grasp the overall sense of language and the social restrictions that “broken English” can produce. Reading Girl by Jamaica Kincaid and learning about a girl’s relationship with her mother, as well as the roles of family, community, and society in defining a person’s identity and behavior. Then Donald Glovers’ “This is America” is a Nightmare we can’t Afford to Look Away from by Tre Johnson. Throughout this course, I had the ability to grasp the importance of language on identity, minorities and the oppression they suffer, empowerment, and accepted societal norms. I was not just subjected to one topic, but I was also able to interact with these different readings and authors on a deeper way because I am black, and I have immigrant parents.  

Given that this was an English class, we read a lot of creative essays and articles that required us to analyze, think critically about, and interpret the author’s intentions. When it came to investigating and dissecting writing and reading, I had the opportunity to do that when we were peer-editing each other’s essays in class. The Language and Literacy Narrative Brainstorming Sheet and the Rhetorical Situation Worksheet were two homework projects that really helped me build my essays over the course of the semester. I had to examine the effects of language and literature on me in depth using the critical questions that were given. For me, the finest times in class were when we gained new abilities as a class and then applied those newly learned skills in our writings. When studying rhetorical strategies, for example, we studied five components: purpose, audience, position, genre, and media. These five components for me was utilized in the second phase of my rhetorical essay.  The same is true of our narrative essay. I learnt the many components of a narrative, and with the abilities I obtained, I applied them to my narrative essay.  

When writing an essay in high school, one of my shortcomings was evaluating quotes. When evaluating quotes, the majority of my responses just echoed what the quote said. Writing our rhetorical and researched exploratory essay in phases two and three was one of the most rewarding aspects of this class. I learned how to pick the ideal quotes for an essay and how to appropriately evaluate and understand passages. During the third phase of our research exploratory essay, we were assigned to submit four outside sources, compose a paragraph based on the prospective sources I chose, and brainstorm how these sources might help me investigate my topic. When it came to completing this tasks, I located numerous sources based on my ESL essay topic. When I physically wrote down the significance of each article or book I had read, I discovered that some of the books genuinely didn’t help me with what I was primarily seeking for, so I eliminated the unhelpful sources and keep the valuable ones. Then again, I was challenged to write my outline and include the sources I plan to use and what I will discuss in each paragraph. From here, I was ready to narrow my sources once more in order to discover more solid proof to back up my thesis for this article. This outcome allowed me to comprehend the diverse goals and relevance of the quotes I had picked to help me write this essay. First, I had to argue and dispute whether this quote was substantial enough to support or make a claim in my essay. Overall, I can claim that my writing abilities have improved. Overall, I believe that my writing abilities have increased. In the end I immersed myself in the culture of literature. I have learned the impact of language, its impact and function on people, how it can inspire or subjugate us, and how to appropriately construct and analyze various essay forms.