Akosua Osei

Writing for The Social Sciences 21002

Alyssa Yankwitt

5/18/22

Self-Assessment Essay

When I signed up for this class, my expectations were low. I was expecting to write just research papers and for the class to be boring but to my surprise, this class was refreshing and my favorite out of all the classes I took during the semester. From learning different skills as a social scientist and writer to making new friends after learning remotely for the past two years, this class has helped me, and I would like to thank Alyssa for being a quirky but wonderful teacher and for making my Monday and Wednesday afternoons entertaining.

Within the first few classes, I was that the purpose of the class was to “learn how to read and write as a social scientist, to improve your general literacy skills, and emphasize your rhetorical choices” and Course Learning Outcomes that I’ll hopefully achieve by the semester which were: “Acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility, enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment, negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation, develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes, engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond, formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing, practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects, strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources).” After going through what was expected of us, I thought it was easy and I wouldn’t learn anything major, but I was wrong.

Our first major assignment was the personal artifact essay in which we were supposed to pick an artifact that we believe is significant to us and has shaped our identity. I had trouble figuring out how to explain my artifact to my audience who may or may not understand the vocabulary I used, my point of view, the essence of the artifact, and how that all ties into my struggles as a Black woman. With peer review and office hours, I was able to establish who my audience was and how to write so that they would be able to understand. With this and the rest of our assignments, there was a word limit and as a writer, I do recognize that I struggle to be concise and can often lose track of what the point is with my essays and writing in general. After getting reviews from my peers and going to office hours, I edited my essay so it could be both descriptive and concise. With this essay, I achieved the first, second, and third CLOs by acknowledging the differences in how I write/speak and incorporating those differences into my writing so that my audience would be able to understand me and revising/editing my essay.

The second essay was the observational essay which was the easiest out of all the three in my opinion. Our task was to find a subculture that we belong to observe an event that was happening within the subculture and write about it in a descriptive way that social sciences would. After showing it to Alyssa, I realized that she did not have as many comments about my writing (i.e., plot, stance, point) but more about the word count and words that were unnecessary which shows an improvement from the last essay in which there were many comments about the point and stance of the essay. I was successfully able to write the essay and complete the fourth CLO which is to engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond by being able to write an observational essay by observing a specific genre of something, writing about it whilst incorporating and using it to my advantage.

With the advice and skills, I learned in class, I was prepared to tackle the last beast of the semester: Researched Subculture Position Paper. I was tasked to find a subculture in which we are active participants, or we’re interested, find an issue, and address a controversial issue and our position within the subculture. The was the hardest essay to write for me because this involved using sources, I didn’t know how to incorporate these sources into my writing and how to formulate my argument and stance. Using the exercises that we did in class and the knowledge that I acquired from the countless office hours and peer reviews, I was able to formulate a stance, and with a last meet up with Alyssa, I was able to figure out how to structure the essay and successfully write the essay. With this, I was able to achieve the fifth, sixth and seventh CLO which is to formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing, and practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects, strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources).

This self-assessment essay is the last thing that is due for my portfolio and even though I had may not have been able to fully achieve all the Course Learning Outcomes, I certainly tried my best and definitely improved my skills as a student and a writer.