The entire course of my time taking the class this semester has been extremely helpful. My writing has greatly improved and my understanding and comprehension of texts has improved as well.

The first two goals on the course learning objective list would be to “Recognize the role of language in empowering, oppressing, and hierarchizing languages and their users, and be open to communicating across different languages and cultures.” and also to “Explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations”. I believe that I have been able to active both goals throughout the semester. For the first goal, we read pieces like “Mothers Tongue” by Amy Tan in Phase 1, which was about language involving and her mom’s “broken” English and how it affected the way she viewed her mother. I got to leave phase 1 with a better understanding of how empowering language can be but also how there can be oppression and a hierarchizing of languages.  As for the second goal, I can say I’ve been able to better analyze writings all from different genres, and I’ve also gotten better at spotting and analyzing rhetorical strategies.

For the next three objectives “Explore biological concepts within rhetorical discourse…Develop strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing…Recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations”, I believe that I have achieved them as well. I took lots of ELA classes in the past, so rhetorical strategies wasn’t anything new to me. I was fairly familiar with them, however, I struggled with incorporating them into my writing, let alone with the intention of appealing to my audience. This phase greatly helped me in these aspects, even with my prior experience of employing rhetorical strategies in my writing. Not only this, but I also have a better time choosing which strategies to use, which is something that I used to struggle with.

For course next three learning objectives, “Engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes…Understand and use print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences…Locate research sources in the library’s databases or archives and on the Internet and evaluate them for credibility, accuracy, timeliness, and bias”, I believe that I gained a lot more insights due to this class. Throughout all three phases I’ve been able to share my writing pieces among classmates and professor Crowe which helped me to go back and revise my work and further improve it. In phase one I had to not only write a narrative but also create a slideshow that I had to present in front of the class.  Also, we learned how to properly use the CCNY library online database, which made the actual research part of my research paper a lot easier. I also feel like I learned more about how to find evidence that properly defends my stance/support my claims related to the topic.

For the last two objectives, “Compose texts that integrate your stance with appropriate sources using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation…Practice systematic application of citation conventions”. I am confident that I have achieved them through the writing of my research paper. The research paper I had to write for phase three had me compose a bunch of texts in order to talk about how genomics is used in law enforcement and why it is useful. Honestly, I will say that the course did not help me much with this, but that is only because I have written lots of research papers in high school and more or less knew how to properly write one. However, I developed a much better understanding on how to properly cite work and create in-text citations along with a references page, so the course was very helpful in that aspect.

In conclusion, I am confident that I managed to complete each course learning objective. Also, I gained a lot of insight on different aspects of writing and analyzing. I have taken away a lot from this course that I will use in future classes, and I am very grateful for that.