Self Assessment

      By taking this class, I am confident I have improved my writing skills. From Bizup’s BEAM methods to all the peer reviews, I have learned various ways to write top-notch essays. There were obviously many ups and downs this semester, considering it was a remote class. I got the opportunity to learn about Freud’s psychoanalytic concepts and how they influenced so many people. As the class progressed, I learned about the importance of mental health and how we make many decisions unconsciously. More importantly, the discussion board posts were useful as they made sure you comprehended the articles and what we learned in class. Engaging with my classmates and gaining their perspectives was quite insightful too.

       In my opinion, peer reviews were one of the most beneficial tasks this semester. When I’m usually done writing my essays, I believe I have done everything right. Then when we do peer reviews, you see your classmates critique your essay, and you start to make adjustments. Sometimes you might notice small grammatical errors or a missed citation. The Turnitin peer reviews were hard-core critiques. My classmates gave detailed explanations on how I could improve my essay. Getting more than one perspective can change your whole essay. Another reader will always spot something to fix. Additionally, making mindmaps was quite helpful because it helped organize my ideas. It was easier to write my essays and know what to write in each paragraph. I have a post for my mindmap for my CRA essay in my portfolio that helped shape my ideas.

     Furthermore, an area where I was struggling was synthesizing and articulating my ideas thoroughly in my discussion posts. I used to summarize a lot and wasn’t sure how I should approach the prompt. But as I wrote more discussion posts and read the feedback, I started to improve my analysis. Proof of my growth is shown in my portfolio under the improvement area, to show how I went from multiple critiques to getting complimented for my analysis. Additionally, an area I believe most people have trouble with is citations. It was kind of a challenge for me to decipher between what your own thoughts were and what was paraphrased from the original text. Thanks to the peer reviews, a classmate told me that anytime you mention any concepts or anything related to psychoanalysis, you have to cite it because you didn’t come up with it. That helped with the in-text citation problem.

     To add to that, I learned about the principles of writing, starting with how to write a proper thesis. The thesis always comes at the end of your introduction and should foreshadow what the rest of your essay should be about. I learned that a genre has multiple meanings and purposes, it’s like a conventional response to a rhetorical situation that occurs fairly often. Also, learning the rhetorical situation, which includes the five parts: purpose, audience, topic, writer, and context. One main thing that stuck with me was that you have to write your essays as if the readers know nothing about the stories. Furthermore, integrating quotes was something new I learned in this course. I had a huge problem with floating quotes, so I made sure I introduced every quote properly. It was challenging to determine which quote was introduced properly and which one you just inserted randomly. 

     Overall, these challenges and experiences will help me in the future when I am writing essays. Learning how to properly cite was a huge accomplishment for me because I know how important it is in essays. I enjoyed both of the classes this semester; they both provided me with a lot of knowledge about Freud’s psychoanalytic concepts and the writing principles. Every article, discussion post, peer review, and everything else has made me a better writer. I will apply everything I learned in FIQWS classes to my future classes. It was a rocky semester due to COVID, but I am looking forward to going back to campus and seeing my professors.