essay

Section C

Please write your essay in the blue book.

Write an informal narrative about "some" composing process of yours. Essentially, you will write a Reflective Self-Evaluation of yourself as a college writer. What exactly does that mean? It requires you to:

a. look back over a recently completed process

b. think reflectively about that process

c. critically evaluate what went well, what didn’t go well, or what you might have done differently

As the aforementioned examples suggest, reflective writing is writing that describes, explains, interprets, and evaluates any past performance, action, belief, feeling, or experience. To reflect is to turn or look back, to reconsider something in the past from the perspective of the present. So, in your final essay, you will reflect and make an evaluation of your experience in this course.

Remember, reflection involves multiple angles of vision. Just as light waves are thrown or bent back from the surface of a mirror, so, too, reflective writing throws our experience, action, or performance back to us, allowing us to see differently. We view the past from the angle of the present, what was from the angle of what could have been or what might be. Multiplying your angle of vision through reflection often yields new insights and more complicated (complex) understanding of the issue on which you are reflecting.

Professors generally look for four kinds of knowledge in reflective self-evaluation essays: self-knowledge, content knowledge, rhetorical knowledge, and critical knowledge (aka judgment). Following are ideas for each of these types of knowledge, which may be used to generate ideas for your essay. Choose only a few of the questions to respond to, questions that allow you to explain and demonstrate your most important learning for the course.

You may write about your composing process for academic papers or creative genres or a combination of both. Reflect as thoroughly as possible upon your writing process and explain it. Your narrative should include whatever you DO when you write, as well as whatever you DO when you compose. Composing should be understood in the broad sense, i.e. composing goes on in your mind when you are cleaning your refrigerator, mowing your grass, etc. It also occurs when you are researching, taking notes, or procrastinating. In essence you are NEVER NOT composing something. So the key to your reflections is to include everything you do that makes a difference in your writing, from having to use a certain pen, to listening to music or sitting in the library. Both your formal and informal processes impact the way you produce a written work, if you use a formal method of note taking or outlining, if you compose on the computer or with pen and paper explore any and all of these activities that are helpful to you in your process. Explore all possible aspects that apply. This is a useful exercise for now and for you to revisit and revise in the future as you grow and become more comfortable writing. It is, in the end, for your benefit.

Self-Knowledge. Self-knowledge involves your understanding of how you are developing as a writer. Think about the writer you were, are, or hope to be. You can also contemplate how the subjects you have chosen to write about (or the way you have approached your subjects) relate to you personally beyond the scope of your papers.

· What knowledge of myself as a writer have I gained from the writing I did in this course?

· What changes, if any, have occurred in my writing practices or my sense of myself as a college writer?

· What patterns can I identify between the ways I approached one writing assignment versus another?

· How can I best illustrate and explain the self-knowledge I have gained through reference to specific writing assignments?

Content Knowledge. Content knowledge refers to what you have learned by writing about various subjects. It also includes the intellectual work that has gone into the writing and the insights gained from considering multiple points of view and from grappling with your own conflicting ideas. Perhaps you have grasped ideas about your subjects that you have not shown in your papers.

· What kinds of complexities did I wrestle with this semester?

· What new perspectives did I gain about particular subjects from my considerations of multiple or alternate points of view?

· What new ideas or perspectives did I gain that may not be evident in the essays themselves?

· What passages from various essays best illustrate the critical thinking I did in my writing assignments for this course?

Rhetorical Knowledge. Rhetorical knowledge focuses on your awareness of your rhetorical decisions—how your contemplation of purpose, audience, and genre affected your choices about content, structure, and style.

· What important rhetorical choices did I make in various essays to accomplish my purpose or to appeal to my audience? What passages from my essays best illustrate these choices? Which of these choices is particularly effective and why? About which choices am I uncertain and why?

· What have I learned about the rhetorical demands of audience, purpose, and genre, and how has that knowledge affected my writing and reading practices?

· How do I expect to use this learning in the future?

Critical Knowledge or Judgment. Critical knowledge concerns your awareness of significant strengths and weaknesses in your writing. This area also encompasses your ability to identify what you like or value in various pieces of writing and to explain why.

· Of all the papers I wrote this semester, which is the best and why? Which is the worst and why?

· How has my ability to identify strengths and weaknesses changed during this course?

· What role has peer, instructor, or other reader feedback had on the way I assess my work?

· What improvements would I make to my papers if I had more time?

· How has my writing changed over the semester? What new abilities will I take away from this course?

· What are the most important things I still have to work on as a writer?

· What is the most important thing I have learned in this course?

Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”