As my Writing and Rhetoric course comes to a close, I am able to take the experience and lessons I’ve learned in this course and reflect on my own writing skills. Before this course, my writing was very mundane, and I often relied on simple standard formats of writing. Now that this course has ended, I realized that I am able to develop a deeper understanding on how to communicate my ideas and thoughts through my writing. A strategy I took away from this course is to question why things are the way that they are, and to look deeper into the rhetorical influence of that piece of writing. A skill I learned is how to look at my own biases and be able to argue for an issue without my biases taking over in an argumentative piece. I think these are important skills that I’ve learned because as my college experience progresses, I will apply these lessons and translate them into my future writing. For example, In my Intro to Aisa class I thoroughly examined the sources I included in my annotated bibliography, by questioning the different perspectives, and the underlying issue the source presented. This analysis helped me better understand the relevance of each source. In one instance, when I looked into a specific source about a play that showed the harsh realities of prison camps in North Korea, I realized that this play used ethos, pathos, and logos to connect with the audience and humanize the victims in the prison camps. 

Throughout this course, I’ve also learned a lot about the writing process. In high school I often dove straight into writing, without first having a plan of the direction I wanted my piece to go in. This caused me to struggle within the first paragraph of a writing piece. I also tended to use my first draft as my final draft. In this course I learned about how useful brainstorming and revisions are in the writing process. Whenever I got stuck on starting the process of writing for an assignment, I thought about what I am passionate about and interested in. This allowed me to make my writing more creative and engaging, and also prevented me from feeling bored while writing. Throughout my series of drafts for different assignments, my teacher allowed us to peer-review each other’s work, and this process of my classmates commenting on my drafts was really helpful and allowed me to go back into my drafts and revise and improve a few things for the final paper. For me, this course was very engaging, useful, interesting and fun. I truly feel that my writing has improved significantly.