Joshua Saint Germain

December 16, 2018

Elizabeth gon Uhl

ENGL 21002

Self Assessment

At the beginning of the semester, my writing skills were quite rusty due to the fact that I had not been in school for an entire semester prior. I choose to start off with an English class as a way to warm up for any future academic activities. I’ll admit, my social anxiety rendered me very shy during the beginning of the class, which probably the reason why I’ve always thought I left bad first impression. I realize that as we continued to freewrite and have very open and emotion-filled conversations, I became a lot more comfortable with the academic setting of the class and classmates.

I wish that I could of done more writing on my letter of introduction, I understand it was very personal and didn’t have enough detail on my experience with ethnography. I feel that my greatest period of growth, personally and academically, occurred during the weeks when we were conducting fieldsite observations and interviews with our classmates. The fieldsite observation gave me a chance to think very critically about the environment I grew up in, the church. It was also an amazing way to practice my ability to provide detail within my writing, a lesson I will be more aware of now on. Conducting a second observation really sealed the deal on increasing my skill with detailed writings, most evident when I conducted an interview with Jennifer Baughman, a fellow classmate, about her sneakers. Even while I was writing about the interview with Jennifer, I knew exactly how to detail the entire experience, which secured me an perfect score on that assignment. After that, I felt more confident approaching my interview assignment and research proposal. In addition, I spoke to the professor about my Box 11 Assignment which required me to write about my privileges and how they may affect my perception of my fieldsite. She understood that I need to provide more detail and information into the assignment, and with my newly found skills in writing, I was ready for the task. When I worked at it again, I was able to achieve the sufficient grade of a “B+”, a score consideriably better than the “C” I had gotten the first time.

In the end, I am very thankful that I chose this class as the one to help me regain my academic writing skills, because it worked! Although I do wish that I could ask the professor to allow me to redo the assignment I had gotten poor grades on from the beginning of the semester, but I understand it’s too late for that now. Now I’m ready to pursue the rest of my academic career with better penmanship.