In this course of Writing for the Humanities and Arts, I have created and engaged with texts in different kinds of forms which demonstrated how culture and personal experience inform writers work. Throughout this course I wrote about ongoing issues such as social, political, cultural and economic that I felt connected to. In those writings I have also used different genres to reflect and respond on to the current time.

I have progressed on many skills, developed new skills such as strengthening my rhetorical knowledge. One of the course learning objectives that I have achieved in this course is “engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond.” I was able to achieve this outcome was through the visual essay. Composing the visual essay was different from writing traditional essay in many ways such as the concept, structure, creativity, less writing, and etc. While you have so many words to describe it with, you could only describe it visually through something which I chose, a meme. Besides, the visual essay takes less time than writing traditional essays however it requires the same amount of work because visual requires creativity and a lot of thinking. In traditional essays it’s a lot of writing but in this one it was less of writing and just coming with the genre to express on the matter of the issue. Lastly, there was no structure to composing this visual essay and I was able to create it the way I wanted to unlike writing traditional essays where there was always a structure that I had to follow.

Another course learning objective I was able to achieve is “acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility.” I was able to overcome this through the opinion editorial essay which was the first paper of this course and it was something very new to me which was also challenging. It required my opinion more on every aspect of the essay. Usually, when we are writing a paper, it’s full of information from the sources and analyzes but not a lot about our opinions on them. This essay made me get familiar with how to analyze sources with my own viewpoint. When writing this essay, I struggled a lot with the format and the structure because it had different parts to it. For example, explaining the rhetorical situation, choosing a publication. The way I overcame the challenge was through the small discussions we did in class with our groups. It helped me put my ideas together and fix my mistakes as well. Through the Op-Ed essay I also achieved is “formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing and enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment.” The way i achieved it was because the essay required my stance on every point, I made using the sources. Also, the revising and drafts we did in class with our group helped me catch my mistakes and develop my essay.

The last paper of the course was the critical analysis in which I have achieved another course objective and that is, “practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects.” The critical analysis required 3 scholarly sources which I used the J-store database and one search to find the sources. Some of the insights of when I was researching, I found sources mostly talking about what actions to take for domestic violence. However, I realized I have to be more specific on Cuny databases in order to find the thing I’m exactly looking for. Then using the advanced search option, I was able to overcome this challenge because I started finding a few sources that was more about my thesis about the issue.