During learning of the whole semester, I completed the three main assignments: literacy narrative, expository essay and researched critical analysis essay. After each assignment, we wrote the reflection for each different assignment.

Please allow me to introduce these assignments first. For the first essay, literacy narrative, we used the genre of narrative to archive this assignment. The narrative essay describes how we grow as a writer or a reader. In the second assignment, the expository essay, I choose Hannibal Lecter as my topic character to complete the expository essay. And I cited the character Ahab in Madness Masquerade as an outside source to connect with Hannibal Lecter who is the character I loved. For the last assignment, critical analysis essay, I read the Diary of a Madman which is a story about a narrator who is schizophrenic. I analyzed the content of this diary to show how the narrator gradually descends to lose his mind. Also, I explored the therapy nowadays and past to show the development of the history of schizophrenia.

For each reflective assignment, we need to use the rhetorical terms to show our learning outcomes. We learned the rhetorical terms and tried to use them in our essay. The characteristic features are also called the genre of an essay. Each essay assignment which I completed has its own genre. And the audience of my assignment is my professor and the peers who helped me to improve my draft of each essay. I appreciated my classmates, they gave many advice that can help me a lot for my draft. I think the peer review is a very helpful way for my essay’s drafts. The main audience of the assignment is my professor. My professor will leave her suggestions after she read our essays. There are a lot of grammatical errors in my essay and reflections. I cannot improve my grammar problems by myself, so I went to the writing center or gave my drafts to my friends.

When I wrote the essay, I tried to focus on my topic thesis to prevent the essay I wrote is out of the topic. I tried to accomplish the goals of each assignment, in other words, the purpose of each essay is the topic sentence surround the whole essay. Expect the purpose of the essay, the exigence of the essay is also important throughout the essay, the exigence of an essay creates a different tone in my essay. What’s more, my stance in each assignment is the important factor before I outlined the assignment. When I expressed my own perspectives in my essays, I need to consider the relationship between the audience and me, there will have differences expressed ways to the different kinds of audience.
For my writing section, I still have some shortcomings have to improve. I always delay the assignment to the deadline and randomly finish the essay. I think I need to write a completed draft early and bring the draft to the writing center for tutoring. As an architect, time is most precious. In general, I would stay up late to finish the assignment after I submitted the works from the studio, so I don’t have time to collaborate or edit the essay. To be honest, I don’t like to face the assignment of the essay, it gives me a headache.  One of the biggest barriers for me in this class is procrastination. I need to improve my habits first. And I have a huge progress in collaborating and editing, and I still need to work on the strategies for reading. In another part, the writing processes need us to engage with collaborative and social aspects. I did not relate the content from the social levels into my assignment, my thoughts did not reach the far levels about social.

From the technologies, we also learned how to use the free outside sources from the CCNY library. There are many research sources located in the online CUNY library. In expository essay and critical analysis essay, we required to use the outside sources from the library to relate the topic of our assignments. We also can practice how to cite a quote from this progress. I spent much time searching the related outside sources, this finding process is difficult for me. The reason is that the finding process is the same thing like reading. I need to read the paragraphs and thought about if they have some relationships with my topic, at the same time, I had to connect all of the sources to my body paragraphs and explained them. The literacy narrative is an assignment for practicing our skill to summarize, the expository essay is an assignment about integrating our stance to the argument, the critical essay is an assignment to analyze the thoughts of authors. Each assignment was helping us to level our academic writing skills.

This FIQWS course studies more academic writing skills. And we would not only focus on reading the books with a variety of genres but also we could use the different genres into our own writings. This course is prepared for the first-year college students, it really helped me to recognize the disadvantages of my essays, and it taught me a new understanding of the essay. “All roads lead to Rome”, it’s same to writing, we are getting many strategies to accomplish the goals of an essay.