Throughout the semester, I’ve learned a culmination of different skills, concepts and  values that helped me to become a more experienced and eloquent writer. Writing is a series of  steps, as it’s not just writing through a paper spilling out thoughts on top of thoughts in a series  of sentences and paragraphs. Writing is more than just the sum of its parts, more than drafting combined with editing as many times as needed; it is a continued process until the work is the best that it can be. The following is a series of steps and levels that I had to overcome throughout this course, I feel that I have become a totally different writer coming out of high school coming out of my sophomore year in college. 

Core Value 1. My work demonstrates that I used a variety of social and interactive practices that involve recursive stages of exploration, discovery, conceptualization, and development.

For my first core value, I felt that I portrayed great improvement and growth in my work  throughout the semester, and that my work and research towards my essays began slowly with  collaboration from online sources and textbook sources. I felt that my work was thoroughly getting feedback, as I did peer review with my professor. Even though I struggled a lot throughout the pandemic-themed semester, I managed. I feel that even though my ability to produce work decreased while doing it from home, I still managed to thoroughly learn to explain myself and articulate my point in almost all my arguments throughout the course. 

Core Value 2. My work demonstrates that I read critically, and that I placed texts into conversation with one another to create comparative meaning. 

For core value two, I feel that my research was closely related to my topic and I explained myself thoroughly throughout my essays. I found many points in my research that related to my topic and expanded my knowledge on the topic. In my causal argument essay, I believe I did a good amount of research on the main topic of education systems being misguided throughout time. I used many quotes from the sources I used in my research, as I quote the author to further my point in my thesis. I did understand that without the research, you have no background and no backup with your arguments, and I learned that most importantly this semester. For example, in my causal argument I state, “Students should be swayed into wanting to learn, no matter what topic it is, as it shows that the student is interested to learn about anything not just to get a letter grade”, and then i back it up with a quote from the article “Teaching Those Who Don’t Want To Learn”, saying that students self-esteem is lower due to the fact that all they strive for is a letter grade and making some students feel they are less smart or competent than others.

Core Value 3. My work demonstrates that I rhetorically analyzed the purpose, audience, and contexts of my own writing and other texts and visual arguments.

I feel that this is the most important and best core value that I have  proscribed throughout the semester. In context, there can’t be an argumentative essay with research used as backup without the use of persuasion and facts to back up the claims. In my definition argument, I use many facts pertaining to biases and contextualize my thesis. An example of this would be when I used the quote from the article, “our school system still values discipline and a structured regimen under the teacher’s discretion”, and then I stated that this integration was implemented in the country for hundreds of years. This value made it enabled me to articulate my point to the audience, as for every main point I put in the essay I had to use evidence to back it up as proof to the statement I made. 

Core Value 4: My work demonstrates that I have met the expectations of academic writing by locating, evaluating, and incorporating literary illustrations and evidence to support my own ideas and interpretations.

For my fourth core value, I feel that I have used this core value a lot throughout my essays. For every paragraph of my informative essays, I used citations and quotes to overlay my arguments and to portray my points. The research I selected through this course was very selective, as I wanted each statement I quoted from my research to articulate the point I was making in every paragraph, as without them the reader wouldn’t be able to understand or validate my claims. I used text citations, and I cited all the websites and sources I used through the course in my annotated bibliography with MLA, and I wanted to make sure it was correct before I did so. 

Core Value 5. My work demonstrates that I respect my ethical responsibility to represent complex ideas fairly and to the sources of my information with appropriate citation. 

For my fifth core value, it is represented mostly through my argumentative essays and  statements. I portray this thoroughly in my visual rhetoric, as there is no win or defeat in the  argument, it’s only a research based and informative opinion. I feel that I used the art of persuasion a lot in my arguments, as I believe it is very important to show that as the reader must rely that your information is real and true. I feel like I used logic over emotion almost all the time, as it wouldn’t be professional and would be incorrect in my arguments to state things with opinion. My thesis would have been a one-sided argument but backed up with research, not opinion, while I refute counterpoints in the argument. I feel that I explained all my sources thoroughly, and cited all of them and articulated my understanding on each point as best as I could. 

Throughout the semester, I have learned a culmination of core values and techniques to  articulate my views and arguments the best way possible, and to back up my claims and points  with research and cited information. Given this, there is much more that I’ve learned throughout writing composition, how to cite in format of APA and MLA, how to find credible sources and implement them in my own essays, and how to give more than enough  information on little controversies talked about today. I feel overall I learned a lot this semester, and I learned discipline most of all when writing these long papers, as information has to be conveyed thoroughly not spilled unevenly and quickly.