The first day of my FIQWS Composition class started in such a funny way. My friends and I sat down in the wrong class for a good 20 minutes before we realized that it was the wrong class. I didn’t really expect much out of the class and the only thought I had was that this course was probably going to need a lot of writing. The first few days of class, we discussed the elements of a Literacy Narrative and a few days later we ended up writing one. Overall, the experience of writing that type of literature was very exciting because I was tackling a new different style of writing, one which I’ve never done before. I was also able to connect with the images my professor presented and I’ve never done anything like that before, so that was one of the many good things that came out of this writing.

When our Exploratory Essay was given to us, the first thought I had in mind was “Oh great! Another thing I have to worry about.” I honestly thought that this assignment was going to be difficult, however my expectations were proven wrong. We initially had to submit drafts that were peer-reviewed by my classmates. I found this w=very helpful towards my writing because I was able to get more ideas from my friends and I got really good pointers on how to improve my writing.

Practicing how to cite our sources properly was one of the many new things I was able to learn from this course. In our class, we thoroughly discussed the elements that go into the process of writing a cork cited page for any of our writings. When I entered this class, I had only little knowledge of citing my sources. Mainly, that those sources were in-text citations, meaning citing straight from a text. Properly citing wasn’t really focused on in high school, they only taught us how to do in-text citations. College is such a different environment for me now because my professors require us having a work cited page for any of our papers. For the SRP (Summary and Response Paper), Exploratory essay, and our latest paper which was our Critical Research Paper, practicing how to properly cite my source helped me in preparation to cite my source in those papers. Now, I am more confident in creating a work cited page due to amount of practice I had in my Composition class.

In our Literacy Narrative, we practiced properly using rhetorical terms and strategies to express my thoughts and ideas to the audience. Our practice in using these terms, helped me in allowing myself to relay my thoughts and ideas to my audience in a more clear, concise, and a very effective way. In my Literacy Narrative, I wanted to reach my audience in a personal matter. I fixated my ideas on using more emotion and relatively connecting my ideas to the Literacy Narrative topic. I connected the two images presented to us and wrote it in a way in which helped relate itself with my audience’s thoughts. Writing this assignment helped learn how to properly use rhetorical strategies to effectively communicate with my readers.

When it came to writing my Critical Research Paper, we were able to discuss with our peers the difference prompts the assignment required us to choose. Each of us had chosen different topics to propose and in doing so, we were able to get a good sense of which prompt we were going to write about. I’m always open to having my peers and I work and share on each other’s writing because it benefits both of us. The information we get from each other was very informative and insightful, which helped me in developing my research paper. Collaborating with other students that were working on the same prompt I chose helped as well because we were able inspire each other’s writing and extract many different things from each other. Overall, working my peers has been one of the most beneficial things done in this course.

The use of technology played an important role in my FIQWS class because it allowed me to get a better sense of the material being taught. In my FIQWS Content class, we used many different online pdfs in order to open ourselves to various pieces of literature like “The Yellow Wallpaper”, “Eight Bites”, “The House on Mango Street”, and many more alike. This allowed us to address our audience through many different online texts that show many different perspectives of Sigmund Freud’s concepts, which was heavily focused on.

When we did our research for our primary and scholarly sources for our Critical Research Paper, we had to use various databases that were found on the CCNY Library page. When I wrote my Critical Research Paper, I had to make sure of a lot of things such as making sure that the sources I used were scholarly. This made things difficult because looking for scholarly sources took a lot of time and finding the right one that best fit and related itself most closely to our writing was crucial. Using scholarly sources and primary databases, overall helped make my paper to be less bias and inaccurate.

When I wrote my Summary and Response, Exploratory, and Critical Research Papers, I learned many different things that helped improve the way I write papers. I learned how to properly, summarize, analyze, interpret, and synthesize my thoughts to be able to form an argument. Throughout the process of writing these papers, I gained a lot of knowledge about citing properly and analyze text coherently. I ended improving a lot more than what I expected.

Both the FIQWS classes that I have taken this semester have showed me what college writing feels like. It showed me exactly the many expectations my professors have from each of their students. It also showed me how crucial it is to be able to meet the criteria my professors had. I can move on confidently to my next semester’s English class knowing that I was able to learn a lot and improve my writing abilities this semester.