Here are the course goals. Take a moment to read them over.
Learning Goals (LGs)
- Compose as a process: Experience writing as a creative way of thinking and generating knowledge and as a process involving multiple drafts, review of your work by members of your discourse community (e.g., instructor and peers), revision and editing, reinforced by reflecting on your writing process in metacognitive ways.
- Compose with an awareness of how intersectional identity, social conventions, and rhetorical situations shape writing: Demonstrate in your writing an awareness of how personal experience, our discourse communities, social conventions, and rhetorical considerations of audience, purpose, genre, and medium shape how and what we write.
- Read and analyze texts critically: Analyze and interpret key ideas in various discursive genres (e.g., essays, news articles, speeches, documentaries, plays, poems, short stories), with careful attention to the role of rhetorical conventions such as style, tropes, genre, audience, and purpose.
- Identify and engage with credible sources and multiple perspectives in your writing: Identify sources of information and evidence credible to your audience; incorporate multiple perspectives in your writing by summarizing, interpreting, critiquing, and synthesizing arguments of others; and avoid plagiarism by ethically acknowledging the work of others when used in your own writing, using a citation style appropriate to your audience and purpose.
- Use conventions appropriate to audience, genre, and purpose: Adapt writing and composing conventions (including your style, content, organization, document design, word choice, syntax, citation style, sentence structure, and grammar) to your rhetorical context.
Comment below with which goal best represents the area of your writing you’d most like to work on and why. Take about 100 words to respond.
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I believe all of the goals have relevance to how I want to improve my writing, but I came into the course wanting to improve my writing process. In general, my writing was usually spontaneous and personal, which isn’t ideal for sharing or submitting. I felt that my writing was sometimes hard to read, and I would get stuck revising phrasing or word choice when I was missing time on the bigger picture. So far, collaborative review has really helped me not stray too far from the topic and to keep all of the ideas organized.
I feel that the area I need to work on the most is #3. Read and analyze texts critically. I use to struggle in high school remembering all the rhetorical devices and types of figurative languages. I think that if I have a better understanding of what those are and be able to apply them and spot them in other people’s writing, it will help me a lot. Not only will I be able to identify them and take better notes, but also I’ll have an easier time citing them and incorporating them when I’m writing.
I believe that the goal I would like to work on the most has to be number 3. Being able to find the critical points requires me to review a piece of writing many times and it is time consuming. I would like to be able to anaylize all types of texts and find out key components and understand them. At the moment, I struggle with picking out the important parts of writing and tend to be confused at times with the readings. If i learn to distinguish the different parts, I feel that it will only assist me in future pieces of writing that I have compile or read for assignments.
I would like to work on the goal of “Compose with an awareness of how intersectional identity, social conventions, and rhetorical situations shape writing”… I feel like I am not personal enough when it comes to my writing; I do not use I, we, etc. enough. In addition, I think I could be a bit more “friendly” towards societies’ views on certain issues/ aspects of life. I have my own way of doing things and am not the biggest fan of being too politically correct.
I would like to improve in all of the goals listed. But specifically the last one. Often times I find that I struggle with syntax in my writing. I think that this is mainly because in school I was always taught the importance of structure but never the details such as correct grammar and sentence structure. I find that this often stands as a hurdle for me because I always feel uncertain about the organization of my writing. I want to work on this goal mostly because I believe that mastering grammatic order and structure will help me express myself in a more coherent manner.
The area that I would mostly want to work on and to improve is gaol number 2 which outlines how to compose with an awareness of how intersectional identity, social conventions, and rhetorical situations shape writing. I think that I have not mastered the art of using rhetoric to analyze texts and in expressing myself through it. I think that I need to study more on how to make my writing more effective and reflective of the demands or expectations of my audience. In this way I will be able to appeal to their emotions and logic while establishing my own credibility as a writer.
I think I need to work on composing as a process the most. Writing is not one of my strong suits so I tend to push it aside a lot. I think that breaking it down into outline, then doing a paragraph at a time, then draft revision would really help me out. In order to do that I need to stick to the schedule I make for myself. Another thing I can work on is analyzing text. Sometimes I tend to rephrase the text or just explain it but I’m not really analyzing it and taking my own meaning from it using lenses.
Coming into this class I had many goals I hoped to accomplish in terms of my writing. One important goal to me is to “Use conventions appropriate to audience, genre, and purpose.” This goal means a lot to me because I want to be able to write better towards an audience along with genre. Additionally, I always felt I needed to improve my grammar and want to be better at this in all styles of writing. So far the writing assignments we’ve had already stared to improve these things bringing me closer to my goal.
I would mainly like to work on composing as a process. I have a difficult time revising and editing my own work. When I look back at my writing, I can never decide what to change and what to keep. My biggest issue is that I am too indecisive when it comes to revising. I could also do better when analyzing certain texts instead of just summarizing or rephrasing it in my own words. I want to learn to be more observant of certain things incorporated in texts such as: style, genre and purpose.
Although all of those goals are significant in good writing, I personally would like to work towards Use conventions appropriate to audience, genre, and purpose. I would like for my writing to be able to adapt to the situation and context of its use and the text. I think the term that currently confuses me the most is genre. I’m usually able to appropriately shape my text depending on the audience – or at least I think so.
I think I need to improve upon the first point the most (composing as a process). When I write, it steel kind of feela like a one and done sort of situation. I also have a hard time getting into things at first. It feels hard to get all of my ideas together which often times makes me not want to start because I don’t feel like I know where my writing will take me. I guess that’s not such a bad things since we do get to revise our writing, but sometimes I think I just want to get everything right the first time. I know this isn’t actually possible to do, but it’s just a roadblock that I feel trapped by sometimes.