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Brittany Berins

ENC 1101

9/29/2017

Self-Assessment Essay

I cant take this class I am going to fail, I am so bad at writing essays kept

replaying in my head as I was signing up for ENC 1101. I had all the hard evidence to

back this theory up. Every grade on an essay in high school was never a good one. I was

dreading this class so much. The first day of class when our professor told us what we

would be doing throughout the semester and the steps we are going to take to achieve our

goals instantly made me feel better. I saw that I was going to have all the tools to learn

how to properly write. The assignments that were due every week taught me the majority

of how to become a good writer. Although I still feel like I have a long way to go before I

would consider my self a good writer, my knowledge of the actual concepts of how to

become one are drilled into my head. Going through my UCF Writes book I see there are

four things students will be able to do at the end of the course: demonstrate and

understanding of writing processes and how writing processes change depending upon

context, demonstrate an awareness of rhetorical situation and acquire strategies for

writing in different contexts, demonstrate their capabilities as readers of complex texts,

and demonstrate awareness of the relationship between discourse conventions, lexis,

genres, and their related communities. As it is now the end of the course, I believe I am

able to exhibit all of the following, although some better than others.

The topic I feel I have successfully mastered out of all three is an understanding

of writing processes and how writing processes change depending upon context. I feel
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this way because on paper three we wrote about this and I was able to identify what my

writing processes are. I start with an outline, then rough draft, then peer review, then

writer my final draft. All these steps help shape my essay to the best it can be. Before this

class I wasnt sure if I even had any writing processes. One of our assignments that we

had to do called Responding to Writing: Straub helped me figure out what I like and

dont like to be criticized on during peer review. Peer review was the most important part

for me because hearing others ideas pushed me to fix my essay and make it better. I

learned that writing processes change depending upon context because for my e-portfolio

I am not taking all the steps I take like when I am writing an essay. For my e-portfolio I

just wrote what I was supposed to do.

The next thing I learned that I feel I have come close to mastering is being able to

demonstrate my capabilities as a reader of complex text. I remember our first assignment

in ENC 1101 was a reading from the book Writing about Writing. I immediately called

my dad in a panic because I couldnt understand a single word of it. Mind you, before

this I was already horrible at reading comprehension, so seeing these complex texts made

it seem like they were in a different language. The first assignment was I Stand Here

Writing by Nancy Sommers. If I recall correctly, I read her text probably six times trying

to understand what the point of it was. When I finally got it, it made a lot of sense. From

then on I didnt have much trouble with the complex text we had to read every week. In

fact I tackled them down. I got 100s on the majority of them and didnt stress about

having to do them at all. What helped me a lot in successfully mastering this concept was

reading the texts very slowly and highlighting the sentences I believed to be important in

answering the question asked for the assignment.

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When it came to being able to demonstrate an awareness of rhetorical situation

and acquire strategies for writing in different writing contexts I feel like I am 50/50.

Rhetorical situation is an event or situation is shaped by language or communication. The

first time I heard this instantly thought, Well then everything is rhetorical situation!

Every conversation I have, every event I take part in is due to rhetorical situation. In this

essay per se I have the audience, who is the other kids in my class and my professor who

will read my essay. The discourse is my professor giving this assignment to us as a grade

so we can reflect on what we learned in this class. And me, the rhetor. I am generating

the motivation to write this essay to complete the task I was provided. Rhetorical

situation was apart of every essay we wrote in ENC 1101 in its own little way. Paper two

was strictly about a discourse community I felt knowledgeable when I was writing about

it.

The concept I feel like I struggled with the most was having awareness of the

relationship between discourse conventions, lexis, genres, and their related communities.

To be honest I have no idea what lexiss even is. I dont remember ever really learning

about it or going into detail about genres. I am familiar with discourse conventions

however, and how to tell if two communities differentiate. I am pretty good with

communities overall. In paper two I wrote about my soccer club as a community and I

wrote about how it works, what its goal is, what you need to participate, and how to even

get into it. Out of those four things, I only understand the discourse conventions. I think I

failed at this part because I was not able to understand these concepts at the end of the

semester like it said I should.

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All in all I think I learned a lot of valuable things throughout ENC 1101 that

helped me become a better writer. My biggest problems that were always criticized on

my essays I turned in was that I didnt organize them well and that I had to expand more

on the topics I mentioned. For example, I would get comments that my essay was very

hard to follow because I went from one topic to a completely other one right after. Also,

that my timeline was out of order. So where I put paragraph four really should have been

right after paragraph 2 and so on. When it came to expanding on my ideas, I would

mention something but not go into detail about it. It would make it seem like even saying

it was pointless. I got these critiques on all of my essays so far. I am having a really hard

time correcting these mistakes and I am not sure why. Other than those two things and

some grammatical errors, I feel like I have taken all the things I have learned from UCF

Writes, Writing About Writing, and lectures in class and applied them to my work. I am

hoping to end with an A in this class. If I am able to achieve this goal I will be very

impressed with myself because I have put a lot of time and effort into this class.