Over the course of this semester, I was able to learn a lot from my English Composition 11000 class. First, I was able to “explore and analyze, in reading and writing, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations”. My Source-Based essay shows the improvements I made in analyzing the rhetorical principles of different genre of articles (i.e newspaper, academic journal, and magazine). I was also able to “locate research sources in the library’s database and on the Internet and evaluate for timeliness, bias, accuracy, and credibility”. This can be shown through the sources and evidence used in both of my Source-Based and Inquiry-Based Essay as well as my annotated bibliography. I was able to learn how to “practice systematic application of citation conventions”. This is evident is all my essays where I used in-text citation for direct quotes and paraphrasing as well as MLA formatting style of writing.

The topic for the work this semester was the Netflix show “13 Reasons Why”. I started my work with brief research on this topic with my Source-Based essay, which is the first essay on this website. Then, I moved onto more specific research about the effects of this show on the mental health of teens, which can be found in my annotated bibliography, Inquiry Based Essay, followed by my Composition in Two Genres.

I think one way I’ve developed as a writer in this class was through learning how to make my writing concise. While writing my Source-Based essay, I struggled to keep within the word count limit. I was forced to go back and line edit my own work, which made me realized how I was including a lot of unnecessary information in my writing which made it wordy and confusing to read. In a way, you can say I would “word vomit” on all my papers. While working on my inquiry based essay, I had the opportunity to present my outline to Professor Pastore. During my conference, she helped me narrow down what’s important to include in my essay, and what’s not. I was told to leave out some of my weaker “acknowledgement and response” as it wasn’t relevant to my essay. I think these instances truly helped me become me a better writer as I can evaluate which information is relevant to include in my work.

My writing process has changed throughout this semester as I can now see the value in writing a first draft. An outline/rough draft of my paper prior to writing the actual paper helped me save a tremendous amount of time.