This website contains three pieces of writing that demonstrate how I’ve progressively developed as a writer. Going left to right, I’ve organized my writing from oldest to most recent. The first paper I wrote this semester was the Exploratory Essay and the last was the Rhetorical Analysis Essay. This site is straightforward and easy to navigate. To summarize, the Exploratory Essay is about gender stereotypes found in Sleeping Beauty. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th paragraphs each discuss a different source while the 5th is a synthesis of all three. Next, the Research Critical Analysis (RCA) argues how Cinderella portrays the American Dream and it includes a counterargument. Lastly is the Rhetorical Analysis Essay which consists of answers to nine rhetorical analysis questions about a sports article. 

         Over the course of the semester, there are three main course learning outcomes that I have improved on. First, I “developed strategies for reading, drafting, revising, and editing.” For both the Exploratory Essay and the RCA, I had to read a handful of sources that related to my topic. Most were peer-reviewed articles or journals that I took quotes from as evidence. I had to do a lot of reading for the RCA and it taught me how to stay focused on reading material for longer periods of time. Moreso, the in-class peer review was a useful tool that helped me revise my essay and make my final draft better. When editing the essay on my own, I found it difficult to find the flaws and I didn’t know how to improve it. But when I read it out loud for my peers, I noticed my mistakes and got valuable feedback on what to change. A piece of feedback on my Exploratory Essay draft was to remove parts that were repetitive or too similar sounding. Another useful feedback I got on that essay was to connect my analysis back to my thesis so that my evidence seemed relevant. That exercise showed me an effective way to revise my essays that I will be using again in the future. 

         Another course learning outcome that I achieved throughout the semester is to “locate research sources (including academic journal articles, magazine and newspaper articles) in the library’s databases or archives and on the internet and evaluate them for credibility, accuracy, timeliness, and bias.” We had a library day in September which I found to be extremely helpful because it taught me how to find sources in the CCNY library database. I learned how to use onesearch and advanced search to narrow down my topic. The database already had citations available for all sources so it was easier to cite each source when creating my works cited page. I also learned that peer-reviewed articles are credible and unbiased sources to use. From working on the Exploratory Essay and RCA, I’ve developed skills in how to use the database efficiently and it could be used for other research papers as well. Most of my sources used in both essays were from the database so it was easy to approve them for credibility. For the few that were not, I had to check for biases by researching the author and their educational background. 

         The third course learning outcome that I acquired was to “compose texts that integrate student’s stances and language with appropriate sources, using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation.” At the beginning of the writing process, as I worked on the outline, I had to read and summarize all of my sources. I developed strong skills in summarizing efficiently with the help of NFG chapter 3. In that chapter, I learned how long a summary should approximately be and how to introduce the summary of a text. This was a beneficial skill that I used in my Exploratory Essay for all three of my sources. Evidence of this can be found at the start of each body paragraph. Furthermore, in my researched critical analysis paper, I used a wide range of scholarly sources to strengthen my work and I tried to summarize while incorporating evidence from each source. While working on the RCA, I learned how to analyze and interpret primary and secondary sources. The primary source I used was Charles Perrault’s version of Cinderella; the secondary sources were academic journals from the database. In addition, I used a counterargument to reveal other possible perspectives in this argument and then respectfully invalidated them. By doing so, I strengthened my argument and made myself seem like a much more reliable writer. I had a stance in this essay, which was that the American dream is represented in Perrault’s “Cinderella” through differences in social classes. The type of language I used was persuasive and informative to help demonstrate my argument. The perspective in this essay wasn’t one-sided because I brought in a different perspective besides mine from a wide range of authors such as Bruno Bettelheim and Elisabeth Pantajja.