My name is Andre Ivkovic. I am currently a freshman at The City College of New York. Before I had started this course I had the wrong expectations as to what I was getting myself into. Coming out of high school I was used to writing essays within a forty-five minute class period and submitting whatever I had finished at that point. English classes were super easy so I had expected the same for college-level English classes. That was not the case. In the beginning, this course made me realize how bad my writing skills were. Over time I slowly had progressed as a writer thanks to all the work I had done. It was very interesting and eye-opening for me. From the very beginning to the very end of the course I was constantly learning new forms of writing. I had learned how to write an Introduction Essay, Exploratory Essay, Exigence Essay, Multimodal Presentation, and Research Critical Analysis Essay. Throughout the course, I had to stick with a topic of my choosing and relate that topic to language and literacy. I choose to focus on the language of Social Darwinism and its connection to Anti-Semitism. This course pushed me to write with more effort and has forever engrained the expectations of college-level writing. Having the ability to interact with other students and receive feedback while simultaneously giving feedback allowed me to learn from my mistakes and other styles of writing. Self-reflections also allowed for growth in my writing since I was able to look back at my work and breakdown my writing decisions to better understand my writing process.
The Introduction module was the first major assignment for this course. The purpose of the assignment was to introduce myself to my instructors while also allowing for my writing skills to be assessed. I had never written a formal letter of introduction before so it felt confusing as to how I would write it. After reading Professor Rodwell’s guidelines and finding examples of proper formal letters on the internet I was put in a much comfortable situation. I learned that I had to include a sender’s address, date, inside address, and salutation prior to introducing myself in the body and closing the letter afterward. The Formal Letter of Introduction allowed me to express to the professor what kind of a student I was, what I expected out of this class, my language, and literacy background, and how I am outside of school. I was given as much creative freedom as I needed to express who I am as a person.
When professor Rodwell first introduced the Exploratory Essay I was left shocked. The class was told that we were to write a research paper exploring how language and/or literacy affects a field of our choosing. This was the first time I had ever been given full creative control as to what topic I had to focus on for a research paper. In high school, teachers would give the class a topic and then expect each person to write according to the topic. In the beginning, I was stressed. I had trouble formulating a proper thesis for a topic that could be related to language. I tried connecting the internet and language and also tried connecting advertisements and language. I had written two drafts and after receiving feedback informing me that they weren’t adequate enough decided to scrap those ideas and focus on something else. Eventually, I decided to focus on the connection between the Language of Social Darwinism and Anti-Semitism. This felt like something more up my alley because I love history and have a decent understanding of events. Finding research for my essay wasn’t very difficult since the CCNY library databases allowed me to find full PDF articles to read and analyze for quotes and evidence. Citations were difficult at first but after using Perdue Owl I was able to have all my evidence properly sorted on the works cited page. After I had finished writing the Exploratory Essay I had to write a self-reflection. I had never written a self-reflection essay before so it was challenging for me. I had written about my writing process instead of writing about my writing decisions which ultimately resulted in me doing poorly for that self-reflection.
The exigence essay felt simple when compared to the Exploratory Essay. No research was needed and no citations were needed. All that was required was explaining why my topic from the Exploratory Essay mattered to me and to the world as a whole. It was a personal essay so it focused mainly on me. I explained how by watching the History Channel when I was younger, I was able to learn about the tragic events that unfolded during WW2 against the Jewish people. I was able to view the language and hatred spewed by Nazi Germany. They were advocating the idea of racial superiority. Seeing people being mistreated based on their identity made me more empathetic to people in my everyday life. Later on, in my Exigence Essay, I had tied in modern examples of instances where I have seen people claim to be racially superior to others. Deciding to tie in modern times allowed me to mention how White and Black nationalists in America view each other. I was able to connect both groups in the sense that both shared hatred for each other. Overall, the exigence essay was a fun and relaxing writing piece to work on because I wasn’t limited to how much I could include myself in and out of the essay. Once again for the self-reflection, I hadn’t focused on my writing decisions and had received a poor grade. I simply gave recap of what I had written which is not what was expected of me.
For the Multimodal translation and presentation assignment, I had to translate all the work I had done throughout the semester into a new form. I decided to make a PowerPoint slide presentation focused on the language of Social Darwinism and its connection to Anti-Semitism. This assignment had to had been the easiest assignment that was assigned all semester. All of the work was essentially done for me in the Exploratory Essay so evidence and quotes for my slides were taken from there. The only challenge of the assignment was presenting the information in a clear way. I was told that it was to be presentable in a clear and simple way so that even a child could understand what was being discussed. Trying to adhere to this advice made me feel like I was cutting out a lot of important information by dumbing everything down. Including pictures and unique designs throughout the presentation wasn’t hard. It was relaxing since my creative side was allowed to come out.
I personally hated doing the Research Critical Analysis Essay. I was confused throughout most of the process. In the beginning, we had to create an Annotated Bibliography. That wasn’t so hard. The Annotated Bibliography is supposed to allow the writer to collect a list of citations that they will use throughout their essay. When annotating, the writer wants to inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy, and quality of the sources cited. I had found sources I wanted to use for evidence, summarized them, and explained how I would use them in my essay. The hard part was writing the RCA Essay. I had struggled with the draft because it felt more like a history lesson and I didn’t delve deep into the language aspect of my topic. That shouldn’t have been possible seeing as my Annotated Bibliography was supposed to delve into the language aspect and explain everything beforehand. I had essentially forgotten to look back on it when writing my essay. When given feedback from peers and my instructors I cut out much of the historical background which ultimately allowed me to be more analytical with the topics relation to language. At this point, I was able to use what I had written in my Annotated Bibliography to aid me in the connection between language and my topic. For this self-reflection I was able to incorporate some writing decisions in my work however I still had included parts of the writing process once more. This was the only self-reflection where I somewhat did what was asked of me.
Overall, this course was fair. It challenged my writing skills for most of the semester. I had to constantly look back on my work and assess whether it aligned with the given guidelines. If I could look back at my work from high school and compare it to the work I’m producing now I can confidently say that I have definitely improved tenfold. Despite struggling with self-reflections throughout most of the course I believe that the experience I had writing them will carry on into my next FIQWS class. Writing research papers is another important aspect of this course that I will treasure since this course is where I learned how to properly write one. Creating works cited pages is another thing I’m grateful for learning. I never knew how to properly cite sources and had even mentioned that in my introduction letter. One major thing that I enjoyed from this class was giving and receiving feedback to and from classmates. It allowed me to learn from both my mistakes and the mistakes of others and how I could improve my own writing.
