Could I be a professional writer? 

Throughout my time in English this semester my writing was a little weak and could be way better because I’m in college now and the expectations are different from being in grade school. As I went through all the phases which I’ll talk about a little later I got to learn more about myself as a writer in deeper ways. And I got to learn more about my classmates and how we all faced similar problems growing up with one of the huge topics that we talked about in class language literacy. 

Phase 1 is where we first talked about language, I feel like it also helped us learn more about my classmates in ways that were more than just icebreakers but through deep stories of their childhood or through their narrative essays and our slide presentations. It’s also where I got to learn the struggles of not having English as a first language through the stories of My classmates. We did presentations of different memories we had that involved language literacy. Such as the story of Amy tan, where she talks about how she never really realized how when doing a school presentation that the way she spoke with her mom was different from the way she spoke with her friends and classmates. Or when June Jordan talks about black English vs standard English and how lots of people have adapted their own way of English that makes them conferrable or suits their understanding of English. 

Phase 2 where we focused on rhetorical strategies. Rhetorical strategies come in real handy when it comes to writing because they can put together a strong essay, such as finding the right audience in your writing or using logic and online sources to make your essay credible. Which I feel helped me in writing my final phase 2 assignment because I used media that I felt would connect with my audience who could relate to my struggle. it also really brought out my creative side to where I got to choose the kind of media I felt would look best with my writing and how I wanted to connect to my audience. But also, I got to use media that I felt was my strong suit because I think personally, I would say that I am funny, so memes are right up my alley. 

Now we waltz are way into phase 3, in phase 3 we did a research paper which was one of my favorite things that we did because we got to brainstorm a topic related to what we were talking about throughout the semester which was language and literacy and talk it out with the professor to see if that topic was a good fit or if you could find valuable information of that topic.. We started forming our essay slowly with each section and then we put it together and made some edits to make the final essay we made. I produced a good topic “the relationship between identity and culture in language and literacy” because it really shows where language and literacy formed through time and the making of society, cultures, and identities.  

In the last and final Phase 4, we looked at all our past work and took the time to edit them with peer feedback and teacher comments. Peer feedback was crucial, it helped me grow as a writer because the person reading my work was also submitting the same assignment, so it put into perspective what I was missing or what I could have added.  Then once we felt that our work was perfect and took all the feedback into consideration, we put together a digital portfolio to document all our past work and even authored this essay that I’m writing now to recap our semester and how we feel the semester went and what we really grew on as writes and students. 

All together throughout this semester we really dived deep into getting to learn more about our classmates through presentations about our past family struggles not being able to speak English as our first language and having to adapt to society to really figure it out as we were growing up to help our parents, learning a lot about other people facing the same struggles that many of us faced growing up with immigrant parents. But also, we got to learn how to find a target audience for our writings so we can put some meaning into it and make it flow. And it made me really think deeper into my writing to make it much stronger and have a connection to whomever I find fit best.