Being in Professor Kelly McIntoshs’ , Writing for the Humanities course, has allowed me to improve as a writer and understand how to write academically at a college level.  To me now, writing is not simply a skill of being able to compose text by conjuring up words on paper but instead being able to use words to express my own thoughts about a specific topic. This class helped me to evaluate social, political, economic and or cultural issues through both reading and writing text. Writing in this class especially, allowed me to communicate my own thoughts by responding to issues I was interested in or influenced me by composing multiple compositions of writing. In this course I crafted 3 major essay which includes: Opinion Editorial Essay, Visual Essay and Critical Analysis Essay. All of these major assignments reflect what I learned in this class in which I then applied what I learned into my essays. The process that went into my writing included strengthening my rhetorical knowledge, understanding conventions of genre, engage in analysis, formulating a stance in order to compose effective writing pieces.

          For the first assignment, the Op-Ed essay, the process that went into developing the final stage of my essay consists of enhancing and improving on my strategy of reading and engage in deep analysis of the rhetorical situation in readings given. Understanding the rhetorical situation of an issue was difficult for me because of the components and elements that are within the rhetorical situation. Rather than analyzing the rhetorical situation I would simply summarize the text. However, doing exercises through discussion posts allowed me to improve on analysis rather than summarizing the text from given readings. For example with the first writing post where I had to discuss the rhetorical situation of another op-ed article called “That Assault Weapon Ban? It Really Did Work,” I wrote, “Everyday tragedies occur all throughout the nation. John Donohue touches upon a much debated topic pertaining to gun control in connections with the rise of mass shootings in America. In his article, “That Assault Weapon Ban? It Really Did Work,” Donohue goes against those who believed that a ban on assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 was not effective but he says otherwise because research shows, “the average number of people who die in a gun massacre has increased by 81 percent in just five years. Assault weapons were used in at least 11 of the 15 gun massacres since 2014; at least 234 of the 271 people who died in gun massacres since 2014 were killed by weapons prohibited under the federal assault weapons ban …” The focus here was on the articles particular claims in which I offered more of a strong summary with very little analysis rather than discussing the rhetorical situation. Realizing that I was not focusing on analysis, I took what I learned and improve on my rhetorical knowledge because the blackboard discussions were designed to help me think through rhetorical strategies and apply my rhetorical knowledge to create my own Op-Ed. My Op-Ed reflects how I have a much clearer analysis of the rhetorical situation for my topic. In my Op-Ed reflection, I wrote, “ The purpose of this Op-Ed is to persuade the reader that most undocumented immigrants do not bring harm to the United States and have them understand that they are forced to leave their country because of push factors that may include violence, poverty, job opportunities etc. I want the audience to know that the United States Immigration and Citizenship system is in desperate need of repair to ensure that people can have a fair shot in coming into the United States legally. My rhetorical strategies that I’ve decided to use to deploy the genre and rhetorical situation includes the tone that I wanted to radiate off in my op-ed.” This demonstrates that I have a much deeper understanding of the rhetorical situation that radiates off my writing experience when writing my Op-Ed because I drew up a stance on my topic regarding immigration regulations and implemented the strategies and main components in my rhetorical situation I addressed.

          “Good” writing I learned involves in engaging in drafting, revising, and editing and reflecting on my writing. Refining these strategies were helpful throughout my writing process especially for the visual essay as it was genre orientated and a multimodal composition. It was a completely different mode of expressing and create a meaning that was based off my Op-Ed topic. In my Reflection draft I wrote, “I want the audience to see that the immigration system is broken and understand that one crosses the border illegally because overall it’s a far too restrictive system. In my poster I decided to focus mainly on one problem that lies within the immigration system. That problem is the difficulty in obtaining citizenship and one factor is green cards.” From this, I discuss the genre I decided to do based on my assessment of the rhetorical situation I address however, I did not elaborate on the choices I made with the genre. Opting for a poster has lead to revising and editing it multiple times. In my final draft of my Reflection I stated, “The first image is of the Immigration of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that has a crack through it to signify that the system itself is broken. While the second image is a maze as it reflects the path that one who wishes to gain citizenship endures. It is not a straight and narrow path but instead it fills with dead ends and and can be long and confusing. The last image is of a family holding each others hand as they are walking with eager. As I try to portray them in a way that shows that their goal is trying to gain access into the United States. The combination of these images allows me to show how difficult it is to navigate through disorienting immigration rules and requirements within the U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services.” I elaborate more on the choices of incorporating the images and merging them into one and explaining my choices for my poster. The final visual is completely different from what I had originally came up with. Although the genre stayed a poster, I changed my choices which is important as it allows me to examine and understand my decisions. The writing process of it, more specially the reflection made me analyze my own poster more and see why i made the choices that I made with the genre. There was more of a creative aspect to this assignment that allowed me to focus more on the visual techniques used to show my stance on the topic. For the writing aspect of this assignment there was editing of me explaining in more detail of the visual piece and the process that went into producing it.

          With all major assignments I was familiar with collecting and gathering research through online databases and the Internet to locate sources as well as knowing how to use them through quoting, paraphrasing and analyzing. I felt that I  had a strong start in those areas because I know that locating credible sources is an important step in the writing process as a means to determine whether the sources are appropriate to include in my writing. Incorporating quotations from outside sources are necessary as the points of quotations are to bolster and help my claims. A sample of my incorporation of quote from my Critical Analysis Essay include, ‘“In People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) article “Dogs in Laboratories,” it states, “At Ohio State University, vivisector George Billman forced surgically manipulated dogs to run on a treadmill until they collapsed from a heart attack. The dogs were killed, and the damage to their heart tissue was studied. In a violent experiment at the University of Pennsylvania, puppies were bred to have a degenerative eye disease that culminates in blindness. During the study, 3-week-old beagles had their eyes cut out and were killed.” This is to say that these dogs endure abusive treatment inside other laboratories for the purpose of acquiring new information and studying the information.”’ I am able to introduce the quotation in a clause with the publication following up with my own commentary on its meaning and how it is relevant to my argument. I learned that the role of incorporating quotation is meant to enhance my own claims and not just to take up a lot of space.

           I took notice that a key aspect is figuring out exactly what ideas I want to communicate to the reader first and make it clear for the reader. I believe that I have not progressed yet as a writer when it came to having my own writing and engage with the collaborative and social aspects of the writing processes. For me, I don’t necessarily take into consideration of  the revisions of others. I believe that it’s something that I need to spend more time on working on because if people look at your work then they give their insight as a reader. Through peer-work i should ask of my peers on what needs improvement and to elaborate rather than ignoring their opinions.

           All in all, from the start of this class to the end of it, from what I acquired from this class is that writing is a process. I took a significant amount of time and ponder on thoughts, next I wrote, to then later organize in a more coherent way. After that I took a step back to reread what I wrote to make more sense of it and make revisions and/or edits. For myself, as I continue to write, there will always be something new to learn about writing and that there will always be room for improvement. Writing in this course had required deep analysis of readings and texts of some sort and in this class, the writing I’ve done include many aspects and specific requirements that I believe that I’ve improved in or could improve on more better. 

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