★ acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility

Through feedback of my papers from my peers I was able to look at my papers through the eyes of someone else. This broadened my perspective and helped me strengthen things like the tone, diction, etc. This helped to create better paper as I was able to convey my thoughts in a way that made it easy for my audience to understand my message. 

★ enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment

I had to look through a lot of sources and narrow them down the amount I used for both my literature review and my research paper. I was able to do this by throughly analyzing the significance of the data in the paper to my research, and finding the date the research was published to see how relevant this data is to today’s issue. After writing my papers and laying out all my theories and claims, I had to recuse several times to make sure my points were clear and cohesive, so that the reader will be on the same page with me. 

★ negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation

Writing both papers for this class was helpful as it helped with learning to truly express my interests and see the reactions of others through feedback. This helped with being able to write a clear, cohesive, and coherent paper that effectively conveyed my message to my audience. That way my message was not lost because of my writing skills and structure. 

★ develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes

It was difficult working with others because my success wasn’t solely dependent on my efforts. Most times I did my part as per our discussions, and had to anxiously wait for others to do theirs. Matching schedules was also difficult seeing as we all had different personal lives that influenced our performance as students. I sort of took on the leadership role to get everyone to do their part, and ask for extensions if necessary. I practiced communication skills with both the teacher and my group.

★ engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond

I was able to write with academic papers that discussed different aspects of my topic. I successfully found a way to implement these sources in a way that complimented each other, and displayed a detailed research. In addition, I used a blog as a personal insight that spoke to one of my academic papers helping to strengthen the claim I used as evidence from the paper. 

★ formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing

I gained this skill in my previous English classes. I got to practice this skill in this class by gathering sources and determining their arguments and their correlation with my research. I also organized my sources in a coherent manner that effectively depicted my argument.  

★ practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects

I gathered my peer reviewed sources from JSTOR and EBSCO. With these databases I learnt to use the advanced search engines to find more current sources that pertained to my research. This way I could use sources that were more reliable and relevant to today. 

★ strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources)

With the provided sources for this course I was able to effectively practice these skills. I learnt how to cite in APA format both in my references and in-text, practiced paraphrasing my sources and analyzing them. This helped with strengthening my paper as the reader was able to see my line of reasoning through my analysis of my sources.