Course Reflection

Looking back on the course as a whole, I have noticed that my writing skills have become better overall, and I improved upon the skills that have given me trouble in the past. One such skill is close reading. Before this course, I had very little experience close reading argumentative texts like the ones we examined in the New Humanities Reader. I always associated close reading with classical literature such as novels and especially poetry. Starting off, this was rather difficult for me to do, but now I feel as though I am able to effectively close read any kind of argumentative text. Coupled with my experiences close reading literature, I believe that now I have a complete skill-set to close read and analyze any kind of text. I have also learned to make more precise, specific arguments. At the start if this course, I only had experience creating arguments with non-argumentative texts, and even those arguments were at times too broad. Through writing the papers for this course, I have learned to make very specific arguments and use specific examples to support those arguments. I have learned to narrow down my focus in each paragraph and make careful and defined statements. Overall, this course has taught me to work with argumentative texts and apply the skills I gained from working with literature to argumentative texts. Going forward, I believe this will be a great skill for me to have as reading, analyzing, and commenting on argumentative texts are skill that apply to many fields of study, including fields that I am looking into.

Course Reflection

I feel like over the course of this semester, my writing has improved a lot. I started off with a high school mentality writing, a systematic way to write essays but I feel like I've developed a creative style to write in. I am able to take two completely different essays on different topics and still connect them to make up my own claim. I am not going to lie, I did struggle in the beginning and there was a lot of frustration when writing my essays trying to get it right, but I feel like at this point I have figured out how to write a creative essay thanks to of course Professor Kelly and the NHR. I feel like a strong aspect people may miss too is the impact the NHR has on one's writing. Reading the essays in the NHR, helped show me how other people and authors wrote complex well-written essays. The NHR gives various examples of essays with interesting topics and exhibits an accurate way for people to write. I came into Rutgers with an amateur  style of writing and the Expos style of writing was something new to me and to adjust to it was a bit of difficulty but I could say my writing has certainly matured since the beginning of the semester. I got to the point where I actually liked writing essays which is a bit of shocker to even myself since I am a math and science guy who always dreaded writing essays. This course gave me a new outlook on writing essays and now I feel the drive to continue even after this course finishes.

Course Reflection

As I look back on my progress as a writer, it is safe to say that my skills have definitely improved. I have never had to write so many long papers is so little time in high school before, and this has helped me learn to read into texts deeper in order to have a deeper understanding so I could have more things to talk about in my essays.  This improved my ability to analyze and read between the lines, and find connections between sources are aren't obvious at a surface level. I learned how to analyze the dialogue between sources rather than just writing about surface-level similarities and differences between them. Not only, that, the nature of having so many essays to do has helped me to improve my time management skills, which is arguably the most important skill a person should have/ In high school, we learned many aspects of how to write a thesis, such as framing a complex argument and stating your position, but I have never considered the "so what?" aspect of writing an essay until this class. I realized, that when I write a paper, that it shouldn't be just an experiment in analyzing paper to see if authors agree or disagree on a subject, or just reporting facts, but the paper should be grounded in reality and have some sort of impact on the outside world. If anything, asking myself "so what?" after every paragraph I write will be my biggest take away from Exposition and Argument. Because if a paragraph doesn't answer "so what?", the paragraph is pointless, and if a thesis doesn't answer "so what?", there is no point in reading that paper. Overall, my experience in this course has been an extremely constructive one.

Course Reflection

Throughout my research process, I narrow down my topic and focus on minority identity instead of a general analysis on the construction of self identity. Initially, I wanted to probe the pro and con of two educational models: home schooling and traditional education, inspired from Andrew Solomon's "Son" and Cathy Davidson's "Project Classroom Makeover". Yet, I realize that the paper could just turn out to be a plain comparison of statistical datas and existing research results, and there is a limited space for my own original argument. Thus, I attempt to propose an ideal educational model combining the research results and make up my own argument. Then while incorporating Twenge's argument as a counterargument, I realized that I can focus Twenge's discussion of self-esteem education, make it the frame and the parameter of the effectiveness of an educational reform, thus, narrowing down my topic even more. Now, I plan to discuss the correlation between level of self-esteem and the expression of marginalized identity, and how self-esteem education can benefit the minority groups if applied with care. 

Over the course of the semester, I gradually learnt the necessity of investigating the connection between authors' arguments and the significance of their argument by creating my original argument. Because I need a developed and complex thesis statement, I am forced to think, ruminate and question the validity of author's argument. Instead of the old format of one, two, three bullet points from high school english essay, I learnt to construct a logic flow so that each paragraph depends on each other. And the argument is gradually developed and completed throughout the essay.

Course Reflection

Looking back over my progress throughout this course, I feel like I have definitely grown as an analytical thinker. Exposition and Argument really developed my argumental skills, while also improving the sophistication of my writing overall. In high school, the papers I wrote were mostly interpretations of literature text rather than scholarly essays, and as such I was always pushed more to find the underlying meaning beneath the writer’s words. Much of my essays were written more on whims that I’d had about the interpretational meaning of the text, and my essays were not as well thought out. Upon taking this class, the shift in focus for the essays on creating original arguments and making connections across texts was very jarring for me and it was very hard for me to write in the style of the essay that was expected. Creating original arguments has never been very easy for me, but I have grown more used to doing it after writing for this class. I feel that this class also teaches the importance of making connections across many subjects, even when they seem to be unrelated, because there are always connections to be made and being able to make those connections is important no matter what you do in life. Overall, I feel that this class challenged me but drove me to become a better writer and thinker. I hope I will be able to continue to use these skills in the future.

Reflection

As I am finally completing my research paper, I reflect back on the beginning of the year and realize how much my writing has changed. I looked over my older blog posts and saw a trend in how my writing and view of papers in general developed throughout the semester. I feel as though my writing has significantly improved in terms of writing according to how this course expects me to write. I was stuck in the mindset of high school writing as I entered this course, looking for a strict structure for papers that entailed simply providing an array of support. I was never really required to write these types of papers in the past, therefore the introduction to this style from this course was extremely constructive for me. As the semester progressed, I transitioned into the habit of combining my supporting claims and sources into a way in which the comparisons help clarify my thesis. My views changed in the aspect of writing fluid, comparative papers as opposed to rigid, choppy ones without much analysis. The process of writing the final research paper was longer than I expected and I am relieved that I did not procrastinate too much throughout the process. I feel the earlier papers in the semester did a fair job of preparing me for the final research paper because I think that, at this point, I truly understand how to relate my sources to a broad idea while also supporting my claims and thesis.