Self-Assessment Essay    

Qaasid Bajwa   

The City College of New York   

Writing for Engineering: ENGL 21007   

Professor Jacobson   

20 December 2022    

   

As I am wrapping up my first semester in college, I believe that my writing has greatly improved. Towards the beginning of the semester, I thought that my writing was good enough for me to sufficiently explain myself, but not good enough to be recognized as great writing.  Now, although my writing is still not where I want it to be, I feel that I have improved tremendously throughout the semester, as a result of achieving most of the course objectives and changing my perception on writing. Additionally, my writing improved because of the different types of assignments we had in this class, such as the lab report analysis, technical description, engineering proposal, and peer review.   

I believe I have mastered a few of the course objectives, such as acknowledging mine’s and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources and drawing on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility. I believe I was also able to accomplish developing and engaging in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes. I accomplish these course objectives through the engineering proposal. I made sure to set up meetings outside of class so that we could maximize our grade for the assignment. This allowed me to see how everyone has a different style of writing, so we kind of blended them together to make the engineering proposal. Furthermore, this helped me achieve the course objectives because I was able to draw upon everyone’s strengths (including mine) and collaborate with them to get our work done efficiently. This changed my perception of writing because I had to adapt my style of writing to work with others.  

I also mastered the objectives discussed in the prior paragraph through peer review. For peer review, I saw how different people used different levels of vocabulary and certain words that they had used which I tried to implement in my essay to sound more professional. I believe that peer review was very helpful in giving me insight on what mistakes I made in my paper. Having my classmates comment on my paper also helped, as having another person’s point of view made it easier to see if I used proper grammar. For example, in my technical description peer review, Sibora showed me how to properly implement APA format. There was a lot of collaboration done in the peer reviews and having other’s perspectives on writing helped me accomplish these course objectives. I believe this made me a stronger writer because I made many changes afterwards to my papers, whether it was expanding more on an idea or changing my analysis to focus on a different thing because of the comments that my groupmates left.  

I believe I also accomplished an additional course objective, which was enhancing strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment. I found drafting my papers was very helpful in identifying my thought process. I feel that I revised and edited my paper a lot, but I received a lot of tutoring help with revising and editing my paper, as I felt that I didn’t really have that much to revise and edit when reading my paper by myself. I went to the Writing Center on numerous occasions for help with revising and editing my papers. I found this process was much more efficient than simply editing my paper by myself.  I found that my self-assessing was pretty accurate for the most part, besides the technical description. I thought that I did rather well in it, but then received my lowest grade in this class for that assignment. However, for the engineering proposal, I wrote a part of the technical description component, and I thought that this was a lot stronger than my previous technical description. My group received around a 93 for that assignment. In my independent work, I think I am a lot better at revising and editing thanks to the tutoring help I received, and this has helped me become better at self-assessing as well and has helped me the course objective.  

I don’t believe I accomplished the next course objective, which is negotiating my own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation. I did not set writing goals for myself this semester. I mainly just tried to write on things that I believed were interesting, and did not set goals for my writing, besides meeting the requirements for the papers that I wrote. However, I did try to make sure that I answered the prompts as well as I could, so this could be considered a writing goal. I tried to write professionally in whichever rhetorical situation that was in this class. The medium which I did this class through was writing, and I believe I accomplished this part of the objective well. Another medium through which I did this class was speaking, as I also spoke a lot in this class, which I believe was effective in helping my classmates and teacher to get to better know me. I have become better at writing rhetorical situations, and that can be seen by my improving theses throughout the semester. I have become much stronger at making a claim.  

I accomplished the following objective as well, which is engaging in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond. I also believe I accomplished formulating and articulating a stance through and in your writing. I was able to meet these objectives through the lab report and engineering proposal. The lab report required annotations and analyzing the lab reports was very interesting. I found that analyzing the lab reports was probably my favorite part of the lab report assignment. I feel that I am better at analysis than description, and that can be seen by my grades in the lab report and the technical description. Although we did not have any analysis assignments after the lab report, my other English class was mainly analyzing ancient texts, and my grades steadily improved in that class after the lab report assignment. I believe this has made me a stronger writer because I am more able to write effectively now than in the beginning of the semester. I made sure to always make a stance in whatever writing I did, because whenever you write something, it has a purpose. You don’t simply pick up a pen and write random things, you write to either inform or persuade others to your point of view on certain things. I made sure to articulate a stance in my lab report and engineering proposal. When I received peer review feedback on my lab report, I was told that I didn’t have a strong stance, and I don’t feel like I sufficiently fixed that by the time it was due. However, I found that the stance made in my group’s engineering proposal was much stronger than my stance in my lab report, which shows how my ability to make a stance with effective reasoning has improved throughout the semester. This has helped me become a better writer because I am able to make a stance with strong reasoning on any writing that I will do after this semester.  

I believe I sufficiently accomplished the final course objectives, which are practicing using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to my writing projects, and strengthening my source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources). I was able to meet these objectives through the lab report, technical description, and engineering proposal. I used online databases for the lab report, and that was to find articles that I could annotate. This helped me learn how to use the resources that City College has to offer for research papers and will help me in the future when I have to write my own research paper. I will be able to use the online databases to see how to write an effective research paper, and I will be able to write a more effective research paper as a result. This has helped me become a better writer because I am able to back up my claims sufficiently now. I used the Internet to find pictures for my technical description and engineering proposal, as well as finding background information for my technical description. I also used the Internet to see how to cite in APA format, which is something I had never done before. Now, I believe I can properly cite in APA format. I am also comfortable with making a references page at the end of my writing. This has helped me become a better writer because most electrical engineers use APA format, so learning how to use it now will help me in the future when I start my career. I found that I am a lot better at picking quotes, as I now see what I want the audience to know in as little words as possible, which makes me focused on picking smaller and more impactful quotes. I feel that this helps me strengthen my papers as well, because I don’t try to waste my time explaining quotes that are not important to my paper. I have become a better writer because of the changes I have made with quoting, and this can be seen from the difference in impactful quotes from the lab report and technical description.   

I feel that my writing has greatly improved throughout the semester, and this is because of achieving most of the course objectives and changing my perception on writing, through the different assignments that we have done in this class, such as the lab report, technical description, engineering proposal, and peer review. In the beginning of the semester, I thought of writing as just simply making a point about something. However, I have now come to realize that writing is a form of technical communication and is an integral part of life. You need to write all the time, whether writing an assignment, emailing your boss if you have any questions, or texting your friends about stuff. Writing also involves heavy use of persuasion. Additionally, whenever you want to use writing to inform others, you need to research about the subject that you want to write on. Furthermore, when someone talks about writing, they usually talk about writing in their language’s alphabet, such as English or Spanish. Even using emojis or hieroglyphics could be considered as a form of writing. Writing is all around us, and knowing how to write is an important skill that will be tested throughout your life.