Sofia Blandon
Professor Hoehne
Fairytales and Re writings
19 November 2019
Self Reflection
This semester’s composition portion of Fairytales and Re writings has been very fun but also beneficial to my writing skills. I feel that my writing abilities have improved progressively from the beginning of the semester to now. I learned how to be more creative with my writing and even with my titles, as they catch the reader’s eye before they even begin reading the essay. I have also learned how to write three different kinds of essays in depth, some that were touched upon in high school but never really looked into fully, those being the Literacy Narrative, the Exploratory Essay and the Researched Critical Analysis.
The Literacy Narrative was the first essay we wrote and I did not know what to expect with this as I had never written this type of essay before. The purpose of a Literacy Narrative is to write about a specific moment or event in your life that helped you grow and develop as a person. I had to really sit back and think about what event or moment this could be and I settled on education and the aspect of teaching that I connected with from an early age. In writing this essay I learned how to incorporate certain rhetorical devices into the essay like thinking about the audience I was writing to, in this case everyone and potential educators, and trying to express my thoughts in a way that is easy to follow and can connect to the readers and hopefully help them, which hit the course learning outcome that says we will be able to recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations. I also had to think about the context in which I was writing this because I needed to go through everything that led me here today, as the reader would not know me and therefore would not have any knowledge on my life and how education has impacted me. One of the course learning outcomes says that we will be able to engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes, which we did and helped me in writing this essay, as well as the others. Being able to work in groups and talk over what we want to write about, while also giving each other feedback on our essays was very helpful as it gave me the ability to go back and edit anything that could be reworded or explained more in detail. Also, when reading the comments left on the essays after being graded those helped me understand what I needed to expand more on or fix, for example the way some sentences were worded or how my quotes were placed in the essay.
The second essay was the Exploratory Essay, where we had to pick a story and explore a theme within that story from different perspectives. I chose to talk about how there is no consent in fairytales, specifically Sleeping Beauty. This essay was also something new for me as I had never evaluated this idea before or even thought about it in detail and actually doing research and seeing that in all the versions of Sleeping Beauty that the princesses were being taken advantage of by the prince and essentially raped was interesting. One of the course learning outcomes says that we will be able to compose texts that integrate your stance with appropriate sources using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation, which is evident in the exploratory essay as we had to analyze our ideas and explain them in detail by using the stories as evidence as well as outside research to further prove our point. The rhetorical devices for this essay were similar to the Literacy Narrative as I was writing this for everyone, but more specifically women as they seem to overlook these aspects in the fairytales. This goes into the exigence of the essay as I was motivated by the fact that I wanted to bring awareness to the issue and hopefully promote change and try to get people to see my point.
The last essay was the Researched Critical Analysis, or persuasive essay. This was a continuation of the Exploratory Essay but involving a lot more research in order to find more evidence for the idea you were evaluating, which could be the same as the one in the Exploratory Essay and is what I chose to do. With the Researched Critical Analysis I really had to sit and look through the different databases to find articles that would help support what I was arguing. This hits one of the course learning outcomes that says we will be able 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. The databases were very helpful throughout the semester as they had pretty much everything you could think of that could be used in the essays, from peer reviewed journals to scholarly articles. It would be difficult at times to find ones that fit what I was writing about but using keywords to narrow down the search, as we learned to do in the library visits, helped to scope out ones that would be relevant and supportive. In all of these essays we also engaged in using proper MLA format as well as citations which hits the course outcome that says we will be able to practice systematic application of citation conventions. The citations are important because they give credit to the people who wrote the stories or articles we are using and they were not difficult to construct as we had many resources, like the Field Norton Guide to help us with citing articles with no authors or page numbers. This textbook was very helpful throughout the semester, it gave examples of not only citations but also different styles of writing like MLA and APA. I had to use APA in another class of mine and I referred to this textbook for information on how to write in this style and more importantly cite, as I was accustomed to citing in the MLA format which is a bit different from APA.
Overall, this semester has helped me greatly and shaped me into a better writer as I have many resources to choose from, I have rhetorical devices that I can continue to use and think about in future essays for other classes, I have developed the communication skills to collaborate with others and talk through ideas and feedback on certain essays and I know how to incorporate citations into my paper and at the end.
