This FIQWS class based around food history and society was a very good experience for me. For a good majority of my school career I’ve been able to do very well in my English classes and not have much of a challenge. However, I felt the difference in my first English class in college. The speed of the class was a lot faster than Highschool and the rigor had increased as well. So, for the beginning of the class I had to adjust. Usually I was able to finish my essays without looking over them or really revising them and still get a good grade. However, in this class I couldn’t do that and had to actually use a lot of the tools within the class to help my writing. Such as, peer reviews, revisions, and outlines. Some key aspects of this class that helped me with creating my essays were using the rhetorical situation and the course learning outcomes.
The rhetorical situation helped mostly in making my outlines for essays. The rhetorical situation includes five things purpose, exigence, audience, genre, and stance. During the creation of my narrative essay, this was really helpful to understand what point I was trying to get across in my work. Also when writing it I had to keep in my mind that my audience wasn’t merely my classmates or just my teacher, but it was also for anybody who could relate to the story I was telling. These few points allowed me to make sure my essay had a nice flow to it and was enjoyable for the reader.
The next thing that helped me with writing essays were the CLOs these helped me to write my self reflection and see what outcomes did I hit specifically while writing my essay. Such as the first course learning outcome, which talks about reading different material based on our essay format. For example, while we were preparing to write our research papers we read other academic journals on their own type of research. This gave us a little more guidance on how to structure our essays. Another instance in which the CLO’s came in handy is when we used the 4th one that basically was about collaboration. The peer reviews really helped in this course because a lot of times when creating my essays I would miss a lot of grammar and content mistakes that others would catch and I could fix it. It also helped to get their feedback on how they felt while reading my essays so I could make sure that the reader was engaged. If they weren’t I’d be able to improve my essay and see how to engage them.
In conclusion, this class taught me key things that I will need to use in my future English classes. Now I know that I’ll always need to revise my essays, create outlines, and analyze how effective my essays are. This class helped me to see how different college level English will be and has equipped me with valuable information that I’ll carry for the rest of my college and professional career.
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