Having this class for the first semester as a freshman here at City College of New York was very helpful. This class helped my writing improved so much due to learning new techniques of writing. For instance, we’ve learned about the rhetorical triangle of writing. This triangle had three main parts which are: the audience, content, and yourself (in this case me). The significance of this triangle is to help the writer use content and make sure it addresses the audience that they’re sharing it with. Personally, before I wouldn’t really address the problem in an essay but this changed after I learned about the rhetorical triangle. Furthermore, I learned a new type of writing style. I learned how to write a conference paper. We did a written document and it helped me because I learned how to improve on my writing that I’ve already written after receiving helpful comments from the professor. This leads me to also learn about the journal manuscript which had helped us to go more in-depth with our paper and receive feedback from our fellow peers. As for research, I’ve learned how to locate better resources through the use of the CCNY campus library website and find peer articles reviewed journal within the topic of my conference paper. In addition, I learned a new type of citation for this class which was called Chicago Manuel Style. One main thing that stood out to me when we were writing our conference paper was how can we create our own definition and how we can use this to argue against what the publisher defined in the original text. More importantly, you can say how this author had wrongfully defined this term and makes you think more about your writing.
Something difficult for me that I had during the class but I believe I improved on was creating a research question. If you do not have a well-rounded question, it will be difficult to address the problem you’re trying to solve and it’ll tend to make the audience confused. To add on, in order to make a good research question you will need to have something that will grab your audience’s attention especially trying to gain a specific audience. Also, Professor Mike Druffel taught us something important about writers. His accomplish was to make his students become better writers by editing our own papers and not assigning new assignments to every class.
In conclusion, I definitely achieved and improve in my writing thanks to this class and Professor Mike Druffel’s help. This class has made me find a love for writing and learning different ways of how I can improve my writings even outside of this FIQWS class. I used some techniques we learned in class in my Political Science and it was very beneficial. I know because of this class, I was able to gain and learn more about writing rather than just grammar or using complicated vocabulary words