Kendry Ortiz

Professor Ewan

FIQWS

May 11 2019

Kendry’s Self Assessment

   During the semester with professor Ewan, we have had plenty of assignments that we worked on. Throughout the semester we have developed our writing knowledge from beginning to end while learning on how we could overcome our insecurities in our writing. While in the class I have always doubted my writing prowess but professor Ewan eventually had me improve more than all the time I was writing in my English classes ever did. I started to understand the formats on how my writing had to be, I have clearly shown that in my writing that the foundation is there all I need is the structure to make my writing up to par with some of my classmates. Honestly, the class was fun and very informative.

   For our first assignment which was the introductory letter at first, I was worried about the expectations of professor Ewan since FIQWS was a college class because I already knew I wasn’t any good at writing. Professor Ewan wanted us to introduce ourselves to him and to tell him what we expect from the class. Most of us at least wrote how we weren’t into the class from the moment we heard about it. We felt iffy about it at first but as we learned from the first assignment that we just had to put the effort into our work and manage our times wisely. My introductory letter consisted of me talking on how much I was afraid of not being able to get good grades and prepare for all the assignments that were on the syllabus and getting everything writes while I’m at it. The introductory letter was my first paper in FIQWS and it wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be since I didn’t spend that much time on it. I really procrastinated on doing the letter which was my downfall. I should have prepared the letter better and look more in-depth at what mistakes there was in the paper. This letter showed professor Ewan where we stand in our writing and what we need to work on. In order to help us, professor Ewan had to talk to each of us on what was wrong with the letter. The expectations of the class were very accurate in the beginning since most of us didn’t get the grades we wanted for the class.

   After the first assignment professor, Ewan made us peer review some of our classmates’ letters and we had to read it over and find what was wrong and how they can fix it. On blackboard, we had to turn those peer reviews in for the other person along with the markings we made on their papers. Then when we got our papers back it was time to get back to work and fix them.

   Professor Ewan made us revise our works into a better fit for the writing requirement. We had to proofread more and more to understand what went wrong even though some of us still didn’t get in the habit of proofreading it benefited us either way. The next assignment we had was the literacy narrative which had the same process as the introductory letter. I was really worried about the narrative since I never heard of it before I thought I was going to mess up along the way. The literacy narrative I have to say was the only assignment that I would say I did the worst on because of the fact I didn’t know what was required for me to write about in the paper. When I got the paperback I was astonished on how bad I made my narrative.

   I learned how to cite properly from all of the assignments that professor Ewan gave us which included having to use the databases. He had citation basically implanted in our brains with the assignments he gave us. I feel that gradually I became more aware of the mistake I’ve made in my essays. For example, the argumentative essay got me the best grade I got in professor Ewan’s class, I proofread so many times that I was started understanding the grammar mistakes I’ve made and I was able to fix most of them.

In my papers, I learned how to paraphrase evidence. Paraphrasing is using evidence from your source and using different words to convey the message of the evidence. In my expository essay, I did this very thing multiple times where I took my evidence and used different words to explain what it meant and I shortened the contents of the evidence and I only included the key points that were mentioned in the evidence. I used paraphrasing to explain the quotes I got from the various sources from the database.

Another skill I mastered was source introductions, source introductions are phrases that tell anyone who is reading your paper where you got your evidence so they don’t think that you plagiarized and you will get in huge trouble. So in my expository essay and argumentative essay, I did this a lot within those essays. When I was talking about how puppetry was able to help children learn and cope with emotional stress. I started by naming the author and the name of the article, book or text. This was helpful for my evidence because I got the author and implied that I got the evidence from their writing.

Another skill that I have gotten good at was the counterclaim. We use the counterclaim in argumentative essays as a way to introduce the opinion opposing to mine and I would even give evidence that would support their claim but then I would refute it and say why the claim might not be as adequate as mine. I felt that my counterclaim was very persuasive in making my claim sound better.

Professor Ewan has also developed our use work cited page and annotated bibliography. The use for them is to cite sources that you used in your paper and in our class we use MLA citation to list the sources we used. This was really helpful because in an annotated bibliography we summarize what the source is about.