This semester in English 11000, taught by Professor Nidhi Gandhi, I have grown extensively as a writer. I have developed better habits in my writing, created more emotionally connected literacy than I have ever had in my past, and have felt more comfortable with my writing pieces/projects. I also love that I was able to share my voice/opinions/ and stories in my writing and write in a way that makes me enjoy what I create.  

The course objective examining attitudes towards linguistic standards and the effects it has on oppressing language users has been something I have mastered during this semester. I was able to highlight this when I was writing my WLLN. I was able to share a story of an instance where attitudes towards linguistic standards oppressed my own life. The screenshot of my WLLN below is my evidence for my mastery in this learning objective because it explains how I know how to examine an experience and analyze it so that others could feel the amount of oppression that the individual who went through the experience felt. Like storytelling there is always a factor of believability and reality and both of those are expressed in my quote picked out from my WLLN.

Another course objective that I have mastered is to explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations. One example of this is in my Rhetorical Analysis Assignment where I created and found rhetorical devices in different multimodal devices and displayed what they were explicitly showing within each of the underlying meanings. I had to produce two diverse types of rhetorical devices within both of my pieces of work, and I ended up producing something that many people in my class could relate to (found a wider audience). 

Although towards the end of this course I did struggle a bit with the collaborating aspect of the class due to an injury, I think overall throughout the semester I have displayed amazing collaboration skills with other students along with my professor. My evidence for this is I was able to the get exceptionally valuable feedback from all my peers when we were sharing our first drafts and I was also able to grant some extremely helpful feedback as well because we all had the same mindsets/ end results in our writings.  

I think I did very well with highlighting a full comprehension of developing strategies for recognizing and practicing key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations. I showed this very well in my Rhetorical Analysis Assignment with my analysis of my poem. In my analysis I talked about a lot, but I discussed particularly how I felt that I could highlight the strong suits of the poem and what my message to my readers was going to be. I did that specifically while referring to rhetorical device’s metaphor and repetition, and how it made a larger impact on the reader and what I was trying to make them feel after and during reading my literacy piece of art.

I have displayed a very solid understanding of using print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences during this semester. One example is in the Rhetorical Analysis Assignment where I created a meme about a relatable Hispanic topic, and I used a photo of the “Arthur’s balled up fist” to express the anger a non-Spanish speaking Hispanic feels when their guardian taunts them for not speaking the native language of their country. This meme showed/ grabbed the attention of many people due to the reader’s open-ended interpretation and the comedic aspect within it.

The one major struggle of this semester is my ability to locate research sources or archives and, on the Internet, and evaluate them for credibility, accuracy, timeliness, and bias. The main reason I struggled with this aspect of the learning objectives for this class was because I and not extremely familiar with this type of research source locating where there are so many ways to do it. The way I like to put it is, I felt like a “Kid in a giant candy store” who is in search of an awfully specific kind of candy. Since the City College database is huge, I got lost when I was attempting to locate the correct sources for my Research Essay. Although I struggled with finding the sources, I did decent with figuring out whether they were credible sources that I should use in my essay or if they were not credible sources.  

Towards the end of the semester, I lacked in my ability to compose texts that integrate a stance with appropriate sources, using strategies such as summary, analysis, synthesis, and argumentation. And this is because I feel like I have not put in an extreme amount of time just testing out the CUNY research databases and that could have been very crucial to my learning objective being mastered. As I continue my journey in City College, I want to make sure that I take the time to understand a text in depth and use all the strategies that my next professor gives me in my handouts to further progress in this category of my literacy adventure. 

Finally I believe that I have completely mastered the ability to practice systematic application of citation conventions in my writing pieces. I know that I have mastered this because all throughout high school I worked on correcting my citation’s, from Chicago, to MLA, to even APA. In this class we focused on MLA for all my assignments, and I achieved the right format for each of my assignments, thus meaning I correctly checked off on the last learning objective in English 11000. 

Works Cited

Cervantes, Gabriel. “Written Language Literacy Narrative” https://gabrielc110.commons.gc.cuny.edu/written-language-literacy-narrative/ 
Cervantes, Gabriel. “Rhetorical Analysis Assignment” https://gabrielc110.commons.gc.cuny.edu/rhetorical-texts-and-analyses/  
Cervantes, Gabriel. “Research Essay”
https://gabrielc110.commons.gc.cuny.edu/research-essay/