Danna Andrade

Professor Sabrina Lopez

ENG 160.4

13 November 2022

Reflective Cover Letter

Because I was not born in the United States, it was more difficult to adapt due to my nationality. someone who is from a Spanish-speaking country, this took me time to learn and try to engage with all of the English grammar laws of this country. My high school did not prepare me enough for many of the things that I would encounter in college. In my opinion, they had a weak system due to the two years of the pandemic that occurred when I was in tenth and eleventh grade. While my education was affected, my effort of self-teaching during the summer was rewarded with the ability to defend myself quite well in English. When college began, my nervousness was very high, lack of confidence and especially pressure were taking over myself. Entering the English 160 class my first thoughts were that it would be a challenge because at the beginning it was a shock. There were too many new things, at that moment fear and shyness were present in my mind because I considered my writing weak and with little lexicon so the beginning of this class would be a big challenge for me. After spending the first three weeks in the class, doing my homework and reading the book Everyone’s an Author, it was not impossible to be able to get more engaged with the course and understand it. Reading the book helped me to shape me and prepare me to do my assignments. Also, the external readings that the teacher assigned trained me to realize that kind of thinking and fear was not fair. Every day my knowledge was growing, and I was learning new things. I understood that I would have to improve my grammar and that little by little I would reach the same level as my classmates, so this showed my capability to grow. This was the beginning to start to develop my analysis, thinking, reading and critical writing that it was all about reading and understanding the study material. Listening attentively and following instructions so that made me demonstrate the skills learned for my assignments. My teacher would give me feedback about the writing from my papers that will become a support and creating a feeling of being comfortable, so this began to let me go more and write freely and express myself confidently. That’s when I start to be able to understand my position as a writer and my audience as a reader. Being able to know my author’s tools was advantageous. Using Ethos, Pathos and Logos to build logical arguments, which at that moment of reading can be imagined and connect readers or feel the emotion in order to make the audience understand what I want to transmit. This class also showed me the four structural arguments learning it uses that were very useful to build my bases when writing such as the Toulmin arguments to analyze, Aristotelian argument to convince the audience, Rogerian argument used to give a middle position where both sides provide their points of view and are heard, putting them into practice in my essays, written in this class were good to construct coherent arguments. With this I could analyze better rhetorical situations that were also present in my daily life, seeing in under which rhetoric they happened, why, and what and with what purpose. Recognizing them when I saw advertisements, commercials, campaigns etc., also being aware of the way people behaved and why they did it, under what influence and for what. As example when my friends tried to convince me for something at the university or when someone let two or more people talk without saying if they were wrong or not. When I wrote my Proposal Essay about “Immigrants and Their Journey Through College” made me consider a problem that SUNY New Paltz has. The lack of resources the college offers for students learning the language that needs to be remedied, and why this problem needs to be addressed. As a researcher my necessity was to conducted research, gave evidence, go on college websites, made calls to the offices of the ESL programs offered by the college and interviewed a student. The principal goal was motive of convincing and showing reasons why SUNY New Paltz should address this issue. Trying to put the readers in the shoes of the students who are struggling so making them imagine the scenario so who reads my essay will understand all that an immigrant has to do because they were simply not born in this country. Students that are newcomers usually are having trouble in their classes because of the language barrier. Although they are a very small percentage, everyone should see that minorities should also be given attention because they also have rights, that is why my insistence about this problem.  I try to manage to get good responses especially because from top to bottom everything was planned with a reason about for this topic. While I was in class I gave the whole context of my essay to a classmate told me that it was a strong topic that was worth highlighting to be treated. My professor also agreed that the research on the topic was good. However, still an area to keep working will be to get better at clarifying my ideas. Sometimes in the middle of developing my document, they unintentionally get mixed up which also makes the reader confused so putting me in need improve by being more specific and getting straight to the point. This process needs to be more cautious and be revise many times before submitting my final version, the summaries need to be not short sentences, if they are long this can cause of confusion, is an important part that to be always considering. There were several activities that were beneficial to my development during this class. The activities in pairs or in groups were valuable to increase my performance certainly, by receiving the criteria and explanations from my classmates that made me realize my mistakes. This help me to correct them and to have creative ideas, it is worth mentioning that the work groups helped me to perform better, to stop being introverted and to integrate myself to the class. Learning the library module had a substantial contribution in my essays because this help me to learned how to search for articles in the library base to compose my assignment. In English 160 my thinking and judgment were reflected in the discussion board posts, where one by one the discussion board posts were helpful to refine my analysis and opinion based on what I learned from the book and outside readings. I felt how this led me to be more reflective and make sense of the material my instructor would present to me next in class. My focus will be continuing in work on my grammar, punctuation, as well as revising the clarity of my text so as not to present unnecessary and confusing repetitions for the audience.  At this day I fell the progressive improvement from September to the end of November, the construction of arguments, counterarguments and the search for evidence have led me to build solid paragraphs even though. I’m still getting used to all that it takes to learn grammar. By this point I see that I have the flexibility on listen,  follow instructions, to adapt to the tone of the writing, and to conduct in-depth research and citation. Working on all my papers shows that I can connect each paragraph to each piece of evidence by making transitions according to each dialogue or textual unit with its respective explanation which were my strengths. With much encouragement for me, I am willing to continue this adventure, to take one more step to learn even more about rhetoric and grammar in college, to continue to develop myself written, reflectively and verbally in English. Just like this semester with ENG 160, ENG 170 is going to be very exciting. It is important to recognize my improvements along the way, plus my desire is to be in that class to face myself and realize what I am capable. To push my limits as a writer and achieve even more of the accomplishments of those achieved in ENG 160 which showed me how creative we have to be to construct sentences in addition to leading me to test my deep thoughts that led me to think outside the box. As an important message it left me with was that it was learning from the failures you have had and then making amends for them in the end leaves you with a sense of satisfaction.

Work Cited

Lunsford, Andrea A., et al. Everyone’s an Author. Third edition ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2021.

“Aristotelian Argument.” Excelsior University OWL, Excelsior Online Writing Lab, 26 May 2022, https://owl.excelsior.edu/argument-and-critical-thinking/organizing-your-

argument/organizing-your-argument-aristotelian/.

Andrade, Danna S. “Immigrants and Their Journey Through the University .” State University of New York at New Paltz , 2022.