December 11, 2018

 

Dear Reader,

     Throughout this portfolio I will guide you through my first semester in City College. We will go sight seeing through one of my most memorable classes, English Freshman Composition. You will see my writing transform from pebbles, to rocks, to boulders. During the semester we had 3 assignments which were all stepping stones to becoming a better writing. The three assignments were:

Literacy Narrative

• The Literacy Narrative was our first paper. In this assignment we were challenged to tell a story about ourselves. We had to be creative in order to grab and maintain the reader’s attention throughout our work.
• When we began our Literacy Narratives we started our drafting phase by using brainstorming. Some of the methods we used were questioning, free writing, looping, and mind mapping. I found that free writing helped me the most as I sat down and just started writing. It’s a good way to get start so that you can get all of your thoughts onto paper. After free writing, I started to use the looping method. I reviewed my free writing, looked at the good points I made and started to free write again. Highly recommend this method for those who like to procrastinate because it gets you started.
• I used the Rhetorical Situation in my Literacy Narrative by honing in on the Purpose. My purpose was to talk about myself to any given an audience. I wanted to make sure that whoever read my paper would read it start to finish. I did this by adding attention grabbers like “My life is much like a swing” because it makes the reader want to know more. I also added so comedic relief so readers would enjoy reading about my story. I also wanted to give a good representation of who I am as a person.

Textual Analysis

• In the Textual Analysis we had to find a text that spoke to us and our community. We then had to analyze it using the Rhetorical Situation. The Rhetorical Situation includes the following: Audience, Author, Stance, Genre/Medium, and Purpose.  
• Through this assignment, I learned to check the credibility of sources. I learned that you should question most things if not  everything, because not everything on the internet is factual. Therefore, it is best to know where you’re getting your information from. It was also great practice researching a topic. What made it enjoyable was that you got to pick your own text and community. I choose the Latino community and the text I choose was a video about immigration in the United States. Incorporating the Rhetorical Situation when I was picking a text was very helpful because it made me look into the author more to see if they were credible or not.

Argumentative Paper

• For the final assignment, the Argumentative Paper, it was our final chance to demonstrate the skill sets that we acquired throughout the course. We had to make our stance and support it with facts and evidence from texts that we pulled from credible sources. I also used emotional appeal in order to persuade the reader. In addition, I introduced images to my work in order to appeal to the reader visually.  
• This was the paper that took the most preparation. We had a whole week of researching sources. We wrote two drafts before our final draft. And we got great feedback from our professor on how to improve our papers. At first I thought it was a lot of time to write a single paper. However, when it comes to writing, it takes time to produce good content.
• When selecting my sources for my Argumentative Paper I used the Rhetorical Situation. Similar to my Textual Analysis, I looked into the Author by researching there backgrounds. In addition, I also looked into the Purpose and Stance of each of my sources and picked out some good quotes that could support my argument.

This was a great class to show me how different it is from writing in high school to writing in college. It helped me become a better critical thinker by incorporating the Rhetorical Situation, manage my time with my papers in order to produce good content, and it definitely helped me see where I can to improve on in the future with this self reflection. I have nothing but appreciation, Thank you!

 

Sincerely Ricardo Peralta,