Self-Assessment Essay
Waking up everyday at 8 am for my course Writing for The Social Sciences, every Monday and Wednesday wasn’t easy. The almost empty classroom that consisted of 6-4 students was where we discussed all our assignments and readings we had due. My name is Addy Bonilla and I am a high school student who is part of the ECI program, a program where we take college classes from freshman year in high school up till senior year which is where I am now. I’m someone who is very introverted when I am with people who I don’t know, in the classroom, or any environment where there are a lot of people. But when I get to know you I tend to loosen up more. In my writing I tend to be more open as it is easier to write than to speak in front of a big group of people.
In this semester I used the skills that I learned from other writing classes and used it in my writing for this class. When it comes to writing I am a better writer at writing about my personal experiences than about someone else. I tend to believe I’m not so bad with research but I am better at reporting a topic than doing full on research. I used my skills in reporting into all three of the essays for this class.
The course learning outcomes that I have engaged with this semester were most if not all. I feel like I improved my drafting skills this semester by having outlines and notes before I started to write an essay which helped a lot. I also feel like I improved my revising skills too as I wasn’t good at taking feedback, that reason being that I didn’t know what to do with it. But I feel like I improved a lot in taking feedback and knowing what to fix in my essays. This also connects to developing and engaging in the collaborative and social aspects of the writing process as I improved myself in getting rid of that uncomfortable feeling of giving and receiving feedback. I negotiate my own writing goals and audience expectations by having in mind what I want to achieve in my writing and who I want my audience to be. This also helps me not go off track and stay to my vision in my writing. I acknowledge my and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources since not all writers have the same views or goals in their writing. I engaged in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing, I wrote in different genres that I have not done before and used different things like recordings in the first essay with the interviews and texts. I formulated and articulated a stance through and in my writing in each essay that I had to do. I did this by finding all the key information and forming a stance from that. I used various library resources like scholarly articles, I used online databases by using an online community to find information for my writing. I also strengthen my source use practices by paraphrasing, questioning, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources in almost all of my essays.
To prove all that I have done all of this throughout the semester I added things in my portfolio to show my progress. Some of those being drafts, semi-weekly self- reflections, a paragraph of what helped for each final essay, escriptions, notes, interview transcripts, annotated bibliography, reverse outlines, multi-modal translation, rationale, and MMT plan, final essays, and commentary. I organized it the best I could for everything to be easy to find. This proves all the work I have done and what I have learned throughout the semester. I have engaged with all of the course learning outcomes this whole semester and I will use everything I have learned and use it in the future with upcoming classes. I am proud of the process I have done and everything I have learned.
