Esrat Sadya
Professor Velez
December 8, 2020
English 11000
Phase 4 Essay
Insecure about writing
As high school ended and college started, I was afraid that my writing would be deemed not good enough for a college student. I was still at the point of understanding my strengths and weaknesses. My vocabulary usage wasn’t strong enough and to improve it, I began reading more books and gradually I saw a difference. I was always insecure about my writing style, thinking that I couldn’t weave a good story using plain simple English words. However, after writing my first paper, the Language and Literacy Narrative, I started to see a sort of improvement in my storytelling.
Phase one essay, Language and Literacy narrative greatly helped me become a better writer. I was to write about my struggles and experiences involving the English language and I absolutely reveled in telling my story as a young girl facing trouble from the start and how I overcame those challenges. Going back to take a closer look at my story and decipher how it developed over the course of an entire decade allowed me to experiment with transition words and phrases such as, “Fast forward to the first six months of second grade”, and “In the next few years of my elementary school career” (WLLN, 1). Additionally, I wanted to refine my vocabulary words and I remembered that while I wrote the paper, a few words came to mind. One of those memorable words from my reading included the word “invigorated “ which means encouraging. As I continued to write the personal narrative, I realized that my story started coming together and I was getting better at transitioning it from a little girl’s point of view to that of a young women’s.
Additionally, after I made my final revisions for the Language and Literacy Narrative, I noticed that I got better at story-telling. I began to be more descriptive. For example, I wrote that “my vow to avoid reading was long forgotten in the midst of these wondering stories that perched themselves on the cream-colored pages of chapter books”(Language and Literacy Narrative Final Revision). I described a change that took place and added descriptive words such as “cream-colored pages of chapter books” to help my reader visualize themselves as an invisible bystander or as if they were experiencing my story through my eyes.
Furthermore, after I progressed my narrative to discuss my journey to rediscovering my passion for reading, I took inspiration from the author’s style of writing and crafted it to fit my story. I utilized phrases such as “falling in the cracks of depression” and “ fell in love with reading because the story captured my heart and mind” to add more depth and meaning to my narrative(Language and Literacy Narrative Final Revision). Moreover, when writing my narrative, I made it my goal to connect to my audience so that they can experience my story the way I lived it for a full decade.
While writing my rhetorical essay proved to be more challenging at first, I eventually overcame those challenges by discreetly making connections to my own life experiences. One of the opening lines of the essay stands out to me, “Tan relates her story about her questioning her mother’s use of the language to bring to light the challenges faced by children of immigrants”. I opened the paragraph with this sentence because to me it felt that the author was indirectly speaking to me through her personal narrative. Thus I wanted to include words from her narrative that other fellow readers could also relate to, such as using the label words, “fractured” and “broken”. This helped me to draw in my audience who like Tan may have experienced discomfort around the way our relatives speak around us.
Moreover, I feel that I improved my writing in phase two essay by using the narratives of two different authors and making analogies. The following sentences were included in the conclusion “similar to Tan, Kingston structured her narrative by appealing to emotions and logic to convey her message to her intended audience. Both authors were very successful in grabbing the reader’s attention and unearthing the challenges revolving around speaking a language”(Rhetorical Essay Final Revision ). I strongly feel that with the above sentence, I was able to explain and tie the whole essay into just a few short sentences. I feel that in my phase 2 essay, I was able to improve my conclusions.
Last but not least, although at first, I had difficulty writing the research paper, I was able to overcome that challenge with my analysis. I feel that using small parts of a quote, a short phase, or sometimes even a single word can be meaningful for a thorough analysis. For instance, I used the following sentence in my analysis, “this can negatively impact immigrants with an accent as they often disregard the mocking by dismissing it as “it was a joke” or “all in good fun”. This further emphasizes that Americans don’t have empathy for immigrants who speak with an accent” (Research Paper Final Revision). This reinforces the importance of the quote taken directly from a source and provides a close analysis of the quote’s meaning. Overall, I believe that my analysis of quotes to support my thesis also improved.
Through multiple revisions and some peer-edits, I was able to strengthen my writing skills. However, more importantly, through doing all four phases of essays, I was able to learn so much about language and literacy. It helped me to understand the struggle of others who constantly face discrimination because of the way they speak. Because I also struggled with getting rid of my accent, this topic of literacy involving the English Language was really eye-opening for me. It helped me to not only become a better writer but ultimately helped me learn more about myself in the process. I believe through using multiple modes and research sources, I was also able to better connect with my readers. I saw the improvement from phase one to phase four essay. Out of all phases of essays, the personal narrative helped me strengthen my written skills the most because I was able to write from experience and talk about how certain issues affected me. How I dealt with or overcame those issues.
