Thomas Bajor 

Jorge Velez 

FIQWS 

December 2021 

    Throughout writing my essays, I’ve learned a lot of techniques and even sort of figured my out about my own thought process. I was able to realize that when I think of an idea of what to write, I don’t just think of one point and then another one. Instead, a bunch of ideas are strung out automatically in my head and I sort of have to organize it. A lot of the ideas I have don’t make it paper because of time limits, but time limits have also helped me focus on what’s important enough to write and stuff that could be left out. My favorite piece of writing I did was probably my phase 3 essay because it was pretty much my phase 2 essay with more ideas in it. But it was also my favorite because I became much more invested in the topic than I thought I would be. I sort of had the idea of doing the essay and getting it done in my head, but now that I have researched the topic, I genuinely want to learn more about accent discrimination. I feel like there’s a lot we don’t know about the topic, simply because the issue isn’t mainstream enough to get people’s attention. People are aware of the issue, accents are made fun of in media all the time, but no one really thinks of how people actually have to deal with those issues. This class and topic was really good for expanding my knowledge about the subject. During my writing sessions I’ve also became much more capable of writing in different styles. Before, I only was able to write formally, no matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t really write any other way. But during the course of this class I was able to break out of that shell surprisingly quickly. I no longer write super elegantly if I don’t need to. I kind of just speak to myself and write down what I say, that’s what I’m doing right now at least. To be honest, I never struggled with writing too much as it is, but this class definitely gave me new perspectives and ways to experience writing. I am also more open to communicating in more languages than just English now. Before I didn’t even consider writing or speaking in another language, mainly due to the obvious idea that the reader most likely would have no idea what I said. Yet this course made me realize that sometimes it makes a point to speak in a different language, even if the reader cannot understand everything. So while it might not be comprehensible to everyone, it is still saying something whether you understand the words or not. What also became apparent to me in this class is that even if many writings have a similar concept or theme or message to them, there are many genres that it could be conveyed in. Some writings take a much more serious and formal approach while others are more humorous and non-formal. This isn’t to say that some of the serious writings aren’t non-formal and vice versa. There is really no extent to how genres and styles can be mixed with each other. A hundred essays could have the exact same story, but the way they are written is what makes them different. And a big part of figuring out a writing style is drafting and planning. That is something that was talked about in this course many times, and it was a semi-new experience for me. I never usually draft out my work, but having drafts be due instead of the actual essay at first really led to a lot room for actually planning out my writing. The non-chronological order some of the drafts were done in was something completely new, but it actually helped out a lot more than I thought. I usually have more struggles with introductions and conclusions, so isolating them and doing the body paragraphs first was super convenient to me. Despite writing an essay usually being just me typing alone in my room, there is a surprising number of social aspects to this. Mainly reviews and peer reviewing. This course was a bit of a challenge in that regard due to most class being online, but it still managed to work. Perhaps not as engaging as being in person all the time but I guess you can’t win them all. Despite being online though, peer review was nearly almost smooth and despite the awkward bits of silence when everyone is reading each other’s papers, pretty dang similar to being in person. For the most part at least. But either with others or independently, we all needed to learn how to locate resources for papers. This was always a straightforward concept to me, but this class did help me refine how I search for articles a bit. It was simple yet affective tactics such as typing in keywords or using the cuny library. But I was also able to search more efficiently for bias and credibility. Once I knew a text or resource was credible, I still had to compose of a text that integrates with supporting sources. This mainly led to a lot of trial and error and eliminating specific sources. It was a lot of time spent on each individual source, but I often looked through and compared my sources to get the best and most relevant ones. Before this course, I sort of just chose the first thing I saw and tried to make a correlation, but because of all the information on searching for sources I have now, finding the right sources for my essay became a lot easier. I also had to get more experience with some digital technologies for this class that not helped for this class but will probably help for all future classes. It was not always fun, and sometimes a bit stressful but it’s all part of the process. And its very important to learn how to use this stuff sooner than later. With that being said, it is worth it to learn all these applications to help us along the rest of the way. Because yeah maybe cuny academic commons user interface is so overly complicated, and sure blackboard doesn’t work half the time, but its part of the college experience, I guess. And is that includes glitching out and not submitting homework I worked 2 hours on only once, then I would say it’s a pretty good experience. 

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