The Growth of My Writing Skills
Throughout this semester I have gained many insights on how to write better essays from my FIQWS writing class. I have learned new ideas such as, rhetorical situations and how considering the rhetorical situations while writing your paper can enhance the essay. I also gained a deeper and clearer understanding of topics I already know such the thesis of an essay and transitions. Getting a better understanding of each element also showed me how the elements relate and build upon each other.
The first and most important writing concept I learned in this class are the rhetorical situations, audience, genre, stance, media/design, exigence, and purpose. My workview-lifeview was a good example of how I focused on the rhetoric’s purpose, audience, stance and genre. I am the center of both purpose and audience. The audience is me because this workview-lifeview essay is for me to look back at it and it acts as a compass to wayfinding my future major and career. This is also why the purpose is for me, to inform me if I am heading in the right direction for a career fit for me. I also maintained an autobiographical genre as my writing style. This is why I wrote my essay mainly in first person, to make it clear that the statements in my essay are my views on life and work. The last rhetoric that I utilized was stance. This essay was full of my opinions and I used reasoning and evidence to back up my claims. For example, when I stated that work, for the most part should be a task someone enjoys and not for the money. Many people would say that money should determine which direction to head to, but I said this is the reason why many people also end up hating their jobs.
In the workview-lifeview (WV/LV) essay, I also satisfied a course learning outcome by performing peer reviews with my classmates. For example, my peer noted that my essay needed better transitions between ideas and paragraphs for cohesion. This is also a reason why she had to re-read many parts of the essay because some ideas did not connect and was not clear.
My research critical analysis (RCA) paper was a good example of how I used a lot of media/design rhetorical situation to help the readers understand my work. I attached worksheets, exercises, and tools I used as my evidence for doing the research. I would then often refer to those images and explain my analysis of them. For example, when I did Bolles’ Petal 3 activity to find my top 10 transferrable skills. I attached the exercise and analyzed the ranking by mentioning how each skill is more relatable to mechanical engineering instead of electrical engineering.
Some other course learning outcomes I met was by using an outside source as a resource to learn more about mechanical engineering in my research critical analysis paper. In my workview-lifeview paper however, I used an opposing outside source. For example, when I used Richard Dawkin’s opinion and his evidence on the idea that God most likely does not exist. The use of opposing ideas in my WV/LV was to introduce a variety of different views on an open-ended topic such as views on life and work. Since I’ve used only one outside source from the library’s database and internet for both the WV/LV and RCA paper, I would want to improve this in my further papers. Another area where I would like to improve upon is my consideration and use of exigence in my papers. Exigence is the rhetorical situation that considers what motivates the writer to write their thought or statement. I believe this can be useful for readers to understand the writer’s point of view better.
I found revision to be the most surprising tool for me. Unfortunately, I wish would’ve put more time into my revision, but I realized the more time spent revising the better the essay becomes. A technique that I used was called the revision plan. Where I create a list of things to revise in my essay and explain what needs to be done and how I can do it. As I stated earlier that my peer mentioned lack of clarification and cohesion in my essay, I realized I would use vague words such as “this”, “it”, “things”, and “they’re”. These vague words do not connect sentences whereas repeating the same word at two different places makes a connection between them. I tried to use this technique in my RCA paper often between paragraphs because the format of this essay was slightly different since I was using subtitles to organize the essay.
Rhetorical situations have really made it easier to write stronger essays. Revising makes essays sound better and richer. The drafts of both my WV/LV and RCA paper lacked transitions between concepts and I fixed it through transition techniques such as repeating words or phrases. There many other things to improve when revising such as word choice, syntax, and grammar, which all can be neatly put into a checklist with the revision plan.
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