Course Learning Outcomes (CLOs)
- 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)
Artifact 1: Product Review Essay Outline
How This Assignment Relates to My Writing Growth
When writing the product review essay outline, I felt lost towards the direction I wanted the product review to revolve around. As a writer, I feel as if my weakest points in writing is being descriptive and as the outline revolved around the strengths and weaknesses of a can opener, I felt that this was an assignment I would not succeed at. This assignment has encouraged me to learn how to emphasize the important points regarding the KitchenAid Classic Can Opener/Bottle Opener as well as make personal connections in a writing piece which was a new experience. Through my personal experiences, reflection of the product, and topic sentences, I was able to use the outline to create a product review essay that met the writing requirements.
Part(s) of any CLOs that address this growth
The CLOs that addresses this growth was “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, and formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing.” Through the outline, I was able to create my first draft of what my product review essay would inevitably become. It allowed for me to formulate my thesis, content for each paragraph, and determine what my overall stance was for the product. The outline also allowed for me to negotiate my audience expectations as it clear that I wanted to emulate a writing style that would appeal to greater audiences such as people looking to purchase a KitchenAid Classic Can Opener/Bottle Opener as well as people of all age groups and as a result was able to use language and rhetorical concepts to engage the audience in my future drafts. Furthermore, a course learning outcome that the draft helped me accomplish was developing a stance within my writing. As I created the draft and determined what each paragraph would discuss, I realized that although the product may have some flaws, it still is a great can opener that I would recommend to others, thus allowing for me to develop a positive stance within my final draft for the product review essay.
Artifact 2: Technical Description Essay
Image 1&2: Teacher feedback for technical description essay
How This Assignment Relates to My Writing Growth
The technical description was a challenging assignment as it required diagrams, measurements, history of the product, and detailed descriptions. The assignment was the first ever of its kind that I had attempted, and I learned how to be informative without using quotes, using diagrams, and give a compressive breakdown of the components within the rice cooker. Furthermore, understanding the importance of the structure of the technical description made the writing piece more efficient and easier to comprehend.
Part(s) of any CLOs that address this growth
The CLOS that the technical description helped me to accomplish are “engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond, and practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects.” My technical description regarding the rice cooker used various forms of media and information to give a compressive breakdown of the component found within the item. Through component descriptions, component dimensions, product images, labeled components, the technical description allowed for me to create a writing piece that explored beyond quoting other published works. Furthermore, I was able to use manuals, the manufacturers websites, and historical websites to incorporate descriptions and information about specific components of the rice cooker to make my description the most comprehensive report I have ever written.
Artifact 3: Lab Report Analysis
How This Assignment Relates to My Writing Growth
The lab report analysis relates to my writing growth as it was the first assignment where I had to comprehensively talk about the strengths and weaknesses of three lab reports regarding the same theme. The lab report analysis taught me the how to critically analyze writing and made me reconsider my writing style. In my analysis I used specific quotes from each report and critiqued how they could have been improved. Furthermore, by separating each aspect of the report under headers, I was able to keep a very well-organized style of writing. The lab report analysis was one of the hardest works completed in this course, and although I did not excel at it, I learned how to be an analytical writer.
Part(s) of any CLOs that address this growth.
The CLOS that the lab report analysis addressed in this growth was “acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility, develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes, and strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources)”. I was able to acknowledge linguistic differences by analyzing the writing qualities of each report. This made me question what audiences each lab report caters to and how I can improve it to reach various groups of people. As a result, the exigence in the report is the analysis I had of the reports. This allowed me to be able to write a in-depth analysis that gave the readers understandings of where the reports were successful and where they could be improved. Likewise, the peer reviews of the lab report analysis outline also helped to improve my writing as a I received constructive criticism that allowed me to shape my analysis into an analytical piece of work. Lastly, I used various quotes from the original lab reports to further my analysis. My report integrated quotes from the three lab reports to provide examples of the points I was making.
