During my first semester at The City College of New York (CCNY), the writing course I took was Writing for Engineers 21007.  By taking this course, taught by Susan Delamare, I was able to benefit from a variety of new ideas and concepts from this course. As well as reminding me of past writing methods to use.

Throughout this course, I have determined most of my strengths and weaknesses. What I consider my greatest strength in this course is my ability to engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts as well as being able to practice using various library resources, online databases, and the internet to locate sources appropriate to my writing projects. As for my weaknesses, the biggest hurdle for me is ways to manage my time. I tend to procrastinate to the very last minute so handing in assignments before the deadline has been an issue for me. Also, properly and effectively citing sources using the 6^th edition APA format has been a problem for me in a couple of major projects. I have had various notes and suggestions from Prof. Delamare in the importance of being consistent in my works cited but I still have difficulties with in-text citations and properly paraphrasing from a source. I would also like to add the another struggle I had with this course was coming to class on time. Having an 8am class and living 2 hours away, I had faced some  difficulties waking up on time and making it to class before it started  If time provides, I would be willing to take my time and thoroughly find where I’m making mistakes in my writing relating to the APA format and look back on to all the resources I was given.

As for my overall assessment of my writing performance, I found that I’ve done exceptionally on my ability to research the necessary requirement to complete an assignment. Especially in my group proposal, after finding out that our originally topic was taken by another team, I was able to effectively research another great topic that was a both a problem human are facing in this world and a viable solution to this problem. What I find that I could work on is topic development. I form a lot of thought-provoking ideas but the way I get it out into my writing could improve. By improving this aspect of my writing, I would be able to extensively show my knowledge of the topic. But for right now what my work says about me is that I only show a baseline amount of understanding that would get me a passing grade. Instead, I want to go above and beyond that. I want to able to pass a standard understanding and go beyond of what is expected of me.

As a writer, I feel that taking this course has prepared me to for my future as an engineer. This course prepared me to formulate and articulate a stance as well as helping me acknowledge mine and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility. Compared to my past writing, I tend to not to look over my papers for grammatical errors or nor would I take into consideration the peer review suggestions given to me but taking this course showed me how crucial these aspects are in becoming a successful writer. Taking these suggestions from my peers in this course showed me that they are writers as well and may be able to comprehend an assignment better that I can. Regarding peer reviews, I could now say that my personal development of the matter has enhanced in a way that allows me to deal with critical judgement and act upon it. The first major writing assignment that helped me realize this was when I was writing my memo concerning the CCNY North Academic Testing Center’s first floor bathroom. An aspect that played onto this was my peers age. I could tell that he was much older than me and when reviewing his memo, his writing style was close to near flawless. I say that I could learn from him and took his suggestions to heart and applied them to my writing.

Usually when I write, I have a habit of jotting down whatever comes to mind whether it grammatically correct or not. After I would reread what I wrote and fix it up. So far, I’ve only done this in the formal letter of introduction since the paper was dedicated to me and my hobbies. So, the whole assignment was simple, and I was able to quickly finish it. Going onto later in the semester, we had to use Aristotle’s three principles, ethos, logos, and pathos. Coincidentally around the same time I was learning the same topics in my Speech 111 class. Going over these principles in my writing course gave me a refresher of the three principles of persuasion and prepared me for later assignments concerning it. This course also helped me in delivering presentations and speeches to a mass amount of people. It showed me to limit the amount of text that I have in a visual slide and show a picture that would sum up what you are talking about.

In the group portion of the course I found that I was more in-tuned to the assignment. My group and I would engage in video calls and texting to give each other feedback on our work. Even the assigned discussion boards strengthened the bond we had in order to complete the project.

Throughout this course, my favorite assignment had to be the group proposal because it helped me realize the potential I have if I apply myself and put more time and effort into my all my work not just writing. As for my least favorite assignment I would say it was the rhetorical analysis because that was the assignment that I put the least amount of effort and time in. If I had really tried I believe I could have done better in that assignment.