Samuel Filpo

ENG110

S.E HAMLET

SELF-ASSESSMENT

12/01/2021

My Development as a Writer

What can ths class teach me and what good can it do for me? This is the question a clueless highschool student, I, asked myself when enrolling in this course. Before taking this course, I had no idea what my goals in literacy were. I didn’t see literacy as more than just writing our thoughts and communicating our ideas. I failed to realise its importance to our everyday lives as individuals and how important it is for us to improve it. Throughout this course I had many assignments and journals that allowed me to identify what my literacy and language goals were. These multiple assignments have allowed me to one way or another, not only identify my goals but also achieve them.

In one of my in class reflections I was asked to talk about passion. In this reflection I mentioned that passion “ gives us the motivation to work hard towards our goals even when we don’t feel like it’s worth it”. What I didn’t know at this time was my goal when it came towards my own literacy and language skills. This is the reason why my phase one assignment was incredibly important. In this phase I identified what my goals were. In the last paragraph of my Written Language and Literacy Narrative, I mentioned what my goals for this class were. When asked to look into the future and write about how I saw myself after this course, I concluded  what my goals were. By the end of this class I wanted to be comfortable with my literacy skills and language skills to publicly exercise them in front of an audience. I lacked comfortability in engaging my audience and using rhetorical techniques. I wanted to be able to use these techniques  to communicate the purpose of my writings and to persuade my audience into believing what I am communicating.

The phase that was the most important and crucial for me to achieve the goals I identified in my first phase was the second phase of this course. In this phase, I was asked to rhetorically analyze an essay. I examined the rhetorical features used by June Jordan in her essay that allowed her writing to be assertive and persuasive. In my rhetorical analysis essay I examined the piece and arrived at the conclusion that Jordan manages to make her essay so impactful by using rhetorical techniques in order to “appeal to the audience’s sense of logic”, “establishing her credibility” and even emphasizing certain terms.

This assignment was impactful towards my learning by allowing me to learn and practice the goal I mentioned in my phase one assignment. I achieved two different course learning outcomes, developing strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing and recognizing and practicing key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations.  In my RAE cover letter I mentioned that I achieved these goals by creatively making myself the audience. This caused me to use a tone that helped explain why and how Jordan effectively uses her rhetorical techniques. My tone was forceful and assertive which allowed my essay to be directed towards someone who wanted to learn about rhetorical techniques and how to use them; myself.

The last milestone I stepped over in this course in order to reach the level of literacy I have as of now, was in my third phase’s assignment. The assignment’s particular task was to first identify a topic I found interesting. Then I had to do extensive research about my topic and gather reliable sources that would support my thesis.  As I mentioned in the first paragraph of my cover letter for this assignment, the insight this process allowed me to learn is the ability to research and look for effective, reliable, scholarly sources which I’m thankful for. After researching my topic  for credible sources and having to properly cite these sources and manipulate them in order  to prove my thesis it resulted in me acquiring my last three learning outcomes. 

This assignment  taught me to understand and use print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences, how to locate research sources (including academic journal articles, magazine and newspaper articles) in the library’s databases or archives and on the Internet and evaluate them for credibility, accuracy, timeliness, and bias and to compose texts that integrate your stance with appropriate sources using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation. Apart from these major learning outcomes this assignment also indirectly helped me achieve the first learning outcome, recognizing the role of language attitudes and standards in empowering, oppressing, and hierarchizing languages and their users, and being open to communicating across different languages and cultures. It taught me this because of my topic. In this research essay I researched how modernization has impacted literacy. This gave me insight on how modernization and the industrialization of literacy has allowed us to use literacy as an instrument to communicate with many other languages and cultures.

Throughout this course I experienced a huge development in my literacy and language skills. Each of my assignments and their phases resulted in me acquiring different learning outcomes. Phase one’s assignment helped me recognize my goals for this class while the other two phases allowed me to achieve these goals. The second assignment helped me by teaching me how to incorporate rhetorical techniques and strategies into my work. While the third assignment, showed me how to gather sources that weren;t only relevant to my topic but also scholarly and credible. I value this knowledge and know I will continue to use each of my learning outcomes throughout both my academic career and my life as a whole. I truly believe this course has developed me into a better writer by improving my skills in language and literacy.

Work Cited Page

Filpo, Samuel, “The Evolution of Literacy”, November 23, 2021

Filpo, Samuel, “  Journal Entry on Passion”, November 15th, 2021

Filpo, Samuel, “ The Judgement in Our Ears”. October 28th, 2021

Filpo, Samuel, “ My First Taste of Bad Medicine”, September 10th, 2021

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