When signing up for my classes this semester, CO-150 was the class I was least excited about. As an Electrical Engineering major, I couldn’t grasp the idea that this class was going to be beneficial for my major at all for a multitude of reasons. I found that the only motivation I had in the beginning of the semester was knowing this class was a requirement to graduate. However, as the class progressed and I started learning more and more, I was pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoyed this course. Not only was the class very informative and fun to participate in, but I feel I am coming out of this class with writing skills that will help me down the road in my profession as well as my life in general. In terms of writing, I learned how to properly summarize an article, write a proposal to a specific audience, and develop elaborate research papers. Outside of writing, I feel as though I have enhanced my skills in properly citing sources as well as using the CSU library database to get scholarly and popular sources. These skills can dramatically help me down the line with engineering research as well as writing proposals for my future employers. Lastly, I feel this class has taught me how to become a better critical thinker. I noticed that a lot of the articles we read were somewhat long especially during our A3 research, and skills like investigating sources, annotating and summarizing deepened my understanding on what authors were writing about and their purpose. All in all, my learning from this course has exceeded my expectations and I feel I have excelled on all projects in this class because of the skills I learned.
The first topic that I feel I successfully achieved in this class was the “Deepen Rhetorical Knowledge” category. To me, rhetorical knowledge is the process of analyzing a specific text and understand the who, what, when, where, and why’s about the paper. To deepen that thought, rhetorical knowledge focused on evaluating what kind of audience the writer was writing too, the overall meaning or purpose of the paper, and the background knowledge and context that was created. One example that I really had to use my rhetorical knowledge skills was writing my argumentative paper. In the process of planning and writing this paper, I needed to address a specific audience with a direct purpose. I chose to write about the harmful effects that electric cars have on our environment and if they really are more eco-friendly than traditional combustion engine vehicles. The audience I chose to address were the companies Tesla and Coda Automotive which are the top producers of today’s electric cars on the road. My purpose was to remind these companies that they are truly doing more harm than good to the environment and more research needs to go towards cleaning up the CO2 emittance in the air, battery recycling practices, and power grid cleanliness. Through a constructive voice and tone, I feel my argumentative paper was very convincing and had a very appropriate tone and format that my audience would respect and connect with. Without learning about rhetorical knowledge when writing a paper, I would not have been as successful as I was.
Save your time!
We can take care of your essay
- Proper editing and formatting
- Free revision, title page, and bibliography
- Flexible prices and money-back guarantee
The second topic that I feel I successfully achieved in this class was the “Deepen Experience in Writing” category. This category was very effective in my writing progression for a multitude of reasons. Deepening my experience in writing means that I learned how to develop recursive strategies for generating ideas, revise my own work as well as others, and proofread more in-depth when editing my papers. A great example of a way I deepened my writing experience in this class was the peer editing workshops we performed. This helped my paper immensely because I could get more than just my own perspective on my topic of discussion. As for reading and proofreading other’s papers, I learned to read aloud and check for proper flow, locate and find grammar mistakes and provide my own perspective on how I would deepen their thoughts in my own way. This would also teach me how to edit and improve upon my very own drafts as well. Also, post reflections were a great way to deepen my experience when writing because it gives you one last opinion on how you did as a writer and address if your purpose was convincing or not. Overall, deepening my experience in writing was a category in this class that I feel I excelled and will use in my future classes.
Being a very creative and intuitive person, I feel I excelled in the “Deepening Critical and Creative Thinking” category in this class. Being able to evaluate the relevance of articles and synthesize other points of view within one’s own was very crucial in my success within this topic. One great project that I got to display my skills from this category was through the Rhetorical Analysis summaries we performed in our A1 project. In this project, we had to read and summarize different articles found in the FEW Reader and have a strict 250 word limit. This was hard because these articles were particularly long and trying to synthesis and narrow our word count down was a struggle. Since there was not a lot of room for elaboration, learning how to read critically made narrowing down the relevant information and the author’s purpose very easy. Creatively, I was then able to write a short summary with only relevant information while still expressing the author’s purpose in only a few words. This project not only awakened my creative mind, but challenged my critical thinking skills. I was able to focus on the little things like tone, purpose, effectiveness and audience which overall made me a better writer.
Taking previous English classes before this one, I always struggled understanding the proper way to cite and use sources in my writing. However, thanks to the “Use Sources and Evidence” category in this class, I can proudly say I learned how to site a source without the use of online sources like easy bib and evaluate the relevance of these sources when I was conducting research for all my papers. One example that challenged this category was the annotations we had to create when conducting research for our A3 argument proposal. Through the CSU library database, we found sources that were relevant to our topic and had to take important points and concepts from these articles and use them in our final paper. This meant we needed to cite sources to prevent plagiarism. After we found out the legitimacy of the source, we could then move on to see what kind of source it was. Although there are many different types of sources out there, we focused on the difference between scholarly and popular sources and reasons for when you would use one or the other. This heightened my literary skills and made my writing more mature and respectable.
Stuck on your essay?
