The meaningful insights I gained during this phase were derived from writing my experience in narrative form and connecting it with larger societal issues. My experience as a child of first-generation immigrants can resonate with many people in America, given that it is a country of immigrants.
In the first essay, my target audience was academic learners, and thus I used a formal tone. However, for the second essay intended for my fifth-grade sister, I adopted a more casual tone and included Chinese words that she could understand. To better convey my message, I also added some pictures to the second essay. The concept of the audience played a significant role in my writing practices, as it influenced the tone and context that I needed to write for.
Writing narrative essays is about rhetoric and the rhetorical situation of our experience, with a significant focus on the audience that we are addressing. This results in different purposes for different audiences. For example, the first essay aimed at broadening the perspectives of academic readers, while the second aimed at encouraging my sister to improve her academic performance.
This phase’s assignment helped me to achieve two of the course learning outcomes: critically analyzing texts in a variety of genres and writing with an awareness of the rhetorical situation. The former requires analyzing and interpreting key ideas in various discursive genres, while the latter demands careful consideration of rhetorical conventions such as style, tropes, genre, audience, and purpose. By reading “La Casa de Cupones,” a narrative was written by Rosa Guevara, I was able to interpret and analyze key ideas, which helped me gain a clearer understanding of the idea, format, and purpose of my own narrative. Like Rosa, I also wrote about my family’s experience as first-generation immigrants, connecting my personal experience with larger societal issues.
Overall, I did well in tailoring my writing to my audience, using appropriate language and rhetorical choices. In the second essay, I effectively used media to convey my context and removed any unnecessary content from the first essay. However, I could have included more descriptive detail while being mindful of word count. My total word count was 1334, which is 134 words over the limit of 1200.