Narrative Essay #1 10/12/2020

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pDe14lVuLEHvJCA9aW7akh-2geeOA4RWUPK7YirMqPM/edit?usp=sharing

Self Assessment #1

I’ve never really written a narrative essay before. In high school the main focus was on writing argumentative essays to persuade the reader to support my main topic and in middle school I never wrote any essays. Not because I was lazy or I wouldn’t do any work but because in my middle school was a religious private school that never taught any academics and only taught the Quran. So this assignment was really helpful for me because it taught me numerous new ideas that I never thought of or knew before. I never knew how to add narrative to my thesis before but thanks to this and the help of my professor steering me towards the right direction and my cousin who told me what adding narrative means I was able to add narrative to my thesis. At first I didn’t know why it was so important but after rewriting my introduction and adding more details to the essay I saw the change and effect that narrative has on a piece of writing. Not only that but I also learned how to write with more imagery. In all my previous writings, my imagery was inadequate or sub par. I never understood what the purpose of imagery really was. I knew it was to make the reader feel like they were there but until all of the readings that have been assigned to me through this course and this essay I never truly understood imagery. It’s kind of sad to know that before I was very clueless however now it’s refreshing to know that currently my knowledge on narrative essays have grown. And I am grateful that I have learned so much because now when I read, whether it be books or magazines, I could look for the imagery and the lesson behind the readings. It’s interesting to see how all of these new ideas will help develop my reading and writing further and this is just the beginning for me. Going further I know that I want to increase my vocabulary and my understanding of future readings and writings. This way I won’t be limited to only one type of writing or one type of reading.

Exploratory Essay #1 11/10/2020

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DrmrYcj2Kmz2ayu5zX0aD8nZDZ1aeZwGr6wgAn9OBVg/edit

Self Assessment #2

This exploratory essay taught me a lot of new things that I haven’t learned yet. This was my first exploratory essay that I’ve ever written so it was a new idea to me. However with the help and guidance from my professor I was able to learn a lot. When I first started writing this essay I was thinking that I had to implement my own ideas in the essay as well however that was not the case at all. Instead you aren’t supposed to include your ideas and thoughts in an exploratory essay. It’s just pure research. A lot of what I did or at least tried to do was paraphrase many different articles that I thought were significant to my topic which was habitat loss due to urbanization. I spent multiple hours reading the articles and looking for new ones while doing research for this paper. So I might have been a little off in my paraphrasing since I tried to do them all at once but I know now that that’s much more difficult then taking your time with one article and then moving on to the next, which is what I’ll be doing from now on. Another thing that I think I could do better is APA format. I don’t think I’ve ever used or written in APA format so this was pretty confusing for me. We did go over APA formatting in class however it was still a little bit shaky for me so I had to do some research on that as well. I know that my APA formatting in this paper wasn’t the greatest but I do hope to improve on that in the future.

Research Paper 12/09/2020

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TYWRuDMZ0IlGlbX39QxtWaGSloF5vT1XiVtTFjPObKU/edit?usp=sharing

Self Assessment #3

This was my first ever research paper that I had to do. I never once did a research paper before so this was pretty new to me. Not only that but this was the first time I had to use APA formatting. Everything about this paper was very new to me. I was never taught how to format the papers using these specific types of formatting such as APA or MLA or even how to conduct research for topics. It was always either an argumentative essay where we would have two to three articles to read and then choose a side and a thematic message or theme or it was a compare and contrast essay where we would be given two articles to read while trying to find similarities and differences between the two. So when I first heard about the research paper I started to ask around about how to go about it. My previous teachers all kept telling me that I would have to research a topic and then paraphrase it into my essay while my friends and cousins kept telling me that I need a lot of information. When I asked them about sources they said you could use any amount as long as it’s credible. Then I had trouble with the graphs which I asked about in class and both professor Nick and Dr. Padilla helped explain that to me and show me how to incorporate graphs into my essay. So for my first research paper I think that I did good but after reviewing it multiple times out of worry I think that I could still improve in how I go about writing research papers. I could include more graphs and sources for future papers. Also I need to diversify the sources that I use. I can’t just stick to one type of sources such as articles instead I could use multiple different types of sources such as journal articles and news articles and more. I feel like if I keep practicing on my writing and if I read more research papers then I will drastically improve on how I write. Not only that but my vocabulary would also increase. Overall for my first ever research paper I am glad on it’s outcome however I do feel like in the future I definitely need to do better. I will keep practicing and someday I might be able to write a great research paper that other people will use as a reference.