Since I began college and started my Composition course for Fairy tales I’ve gained new knowledge when it comes to the variety of genres and rhetorical situations that I’ve analyzed. Genres such as poems, essays, narratives by others, and articles written. Not only did I get to read these types of genres but I also engaged in making some myself. Some consisted of retellings of a story that I wrote whilst having its own spin on it, or analyzing themes in the realm of fairy tales that have been prominent in vast stories.
In an article that was about Harvey Weinstein that compared his current situation with the women that he forced himself onto and the multiple women that came out about this too a story called disgrace in which a similar person who committed acts like these. The point is that me and my class analyzed the components of the story that made each other similar and different. I learned to connect key details to one another to assemble a connection between the two, which I use whenever trying to compare and contrast to stories. At the end of the reading we discussed the rhetorical elements of the story like what was the purpose of this article, who was the audience and such. Doing this helped notice rhetorical elements in writing far better then before and for myself to think about this when working on my own writing.
When writing my own literacy narrative about myself it was something that I was rusty with since I was new to college and haven’t written in quite some time. When writing it I tried my best to explain how writing felt to me at the time and for the most part I couldn’t really feel a special connection to it. With that problem it was hard for me to give more detail and description into things I wrote, which is very important since the main topic of the essay was myself and for the audience to get to know me as a writer I would need to import more description into my writing.
The next essay that I would partake in would be the summary and response essay. Here I summarized the story of “Sleeping Beauty” and responded to it. When looking at what I wrote I think I gave a good description of the story using detail and description but my response I see was quite lackluster. When responding I kept it breef, the response was only a paragraph. For my audience to know that I really understood what I read a more in depth response of the story would be beneficial to me and the reader.
When I start off my writing process I usually disperse the time to do it; meaning that I would do a page or 2 in one sitting and do the rest of it 3 or 4 hours later. This is because whenever I am writing, getting engaged in it becomes troublesome and I begin to lose focus. This is probably not a good way to go about it because I start to lose information in the time that i’m not writing. This is a problem that till this day I keep doing and is becoming a bad habit of mine. Going forward I think I should go with a more direct approach and hoan in on the essay I’m working on and try my best to finish it straightforward.
Learning how to properly cite sources is another thing that I learned to do in my time writing in this course. Before I wasn’t required to source and even when I did it didn’t have to be too good but I think I’ve come a long way when it comes to this now. Sourcing got easier over time and I’m now able to navigate the process of it easier than I have before. In my USSO class which is about the study of our country I had to do a research paper of my choosing and I chose racism in america. This was probably my best showing of sourcing since I had to be very specific with what information I was bringing in to my paper. I had about 5 sources all pertaining to my thesis and in the end I got a good grade which made me more confident when it came to looking for sources.
In this same essay we also used footnotes which is similar to sourcing but you use the link of the sources and place them to a specific phrase or sentence used in the essay. I had no idea how to use them beforehand but after I did my research on it, I now know how to do it properly enhancing my research ability more.
My exploratory essay showed me how to analyze themes and patterns in various stories and how to bring them all to focus in my writing. I used the tale of “Red Riding hood” to show how females in fairy tales are usually undermined to the fragile or non assertive character in their respective stories. I gave various examples of this with different versions of the story. Going into it I analyzed that my audience would be people who agree or disagree with the thesis so I geared more towards people that didn’t so that I can persuade them too my side of the argument. Looking back on the essay I realized I made a lot of mistakes. Once again I was using vague statements with no detail. Some words in my essay didn’t even make sense. I put more into the summary of the stories then analyzing them all together which is the most important part of the essay. This was due to me being sloppy on the essay and not reading it over for any mistakes.
Without proofreading there’s no telling what you might have done wrong in your essay. Putting more thought and care into my essays as a whole would strengthen them and give more confidence as a writer going forward.
My Research Critical analysis was my last essay in my composition course and in it I did the opposite of the Exploratory essay, meaning that the thesis was reversed. Instead of writing about how female heroines are undermined in fairy tales, I wrote of how they are used in a more assertive role. My audience once again was the same but instead I geared more to the people that thought the opposite of my thesis. Once again however the same mistakes were on this essay as my previous one. Looking back on them now I see all the errors very clearly and know how to overcome these obstacles as a writer.
Whatever my next piece of writing may be I will make sure that when writing that I put care and much thought into it and look back on previous essays so I overcome the errors that I made.
