The self-assessment was written at the start of the Writing 39C course. This was reflective writing that also constantly reminds me of what I need to improve on in the class.
Self-Assessment 2022 Spring
I would say that my relationship with writing is that I am loosely connected with writing. During high school, I took both English related AP courses and had gradual improvements with the help from my teachers and classmates. But my writing experience in college is merely a Writing 39B course. At the same time, I am an English language learner and I do not write in English daily. Still, I felt that my strong points outweigh the negatives. I trust my willingness to learn and read. I have had a great experience and excellent grade in Writing 39B and I have substantial experience in public speaking in both Mandarin and English. I occasionally record some of my thoughts and write some stories in English, but I feel like I am still on the path of finding my own writing style. Luckily, Writing 39B was a great stepping stone for me as I found my confidence and pleasure in writing. Last quarter was a period where I slowly regained the writing working style I once had and continue to build upon it. The essays in particular were two opportunities where I really pushed myself to compose and improve my drafts. These projects have shown me that writing is not so scary.
I often get my research from YouTube, books, and databases. YouTube is actually my first step in research instead of Google, because YouTube consists of many detailed videos, sometimes animations, to illustrate a specific topic. Since it is an open platform, people often try to do their best to convey their opinions on particular issues. This actually gives YouTube the advantage of presenting many different and nuanced sides of stories, therefore making us, the users, grasping the ideas easily. Books and databases are similar to YouTube but have deeper analysis and more complex opinions. I always consider these two sources to be more credible than YouTube since these publications often go through several levels of reviews and editing. I would prefer to quote more from books and databases and less from YouTube in my research. I often look at multiple sources before I start my writing to construct a basic mental image of the context. I believe that hearing from different sides and observing them with my own eyes not only paints the full picture, but also adds clarity and avoids biases. Being exposed to numerous sources also allows me to have more evidence at hand when addressing a certain topic. These evidence, being multi-model, will make my argument more compelling.
I felt I needed improvements on the construction of my sentences and providing deep thoughts. Even right now, I feel like my sentences are being squeezed out of my brain instead of always being available. I find it hard to formulate fragments of thoughts into meaningful texts. For example, I often find it hard to meet the minimum number of words. My thoughts usually dry out before I reach the word requirement. I hope I can improve my composition and make my essay more rich in content. My goal for myself in this class is to spend more time on reading and understanding the course material, compose essays that I consider to be great, and get a good grade for the class. I think argument and research is really important for my future career. Being an economics student, I need to get ready for reading scholarly articles and new findings from experiments. Knowing how to analyze different types of evidence and having effective research skills can be essential to making choices in the financial market. Since we live at a time where information spreads quicker than ever, we need to have a mindset that can identify misleading and wrong information while knowing how to use the correct information to our advantage. These are skills that are crucial to everyone in the society.
I heard the course is really useful when it comes to preparing for upper division writing and even grad school. I really hope that my argument and research strategies can be greatly improved and be helpful to my future life. My anxiety is that I fear I would turn to procrastination when seeing a lot of work to be done. I hope I can accept the challenge and believe in myself. I do actually feel somewhat prepared for the class, not just because of my great experience in Writing 39B, but that I have actually written an 11-page research paper in high school. Although it was four years ago, having this as a small accomplishment is soothing my anxiety and reminds me that research and writing can make each other much more fun.
I feel like just knowing about the office hour and the help I can receive is alleviating enough. I think I will definitely utilize more resources provided by Brian and the writing department to help me obtain my success.