In the beginning of this semester I thought English 110 class was about learning vocabulary and writing essays, which seemed easy. I was wrong. I learned so much more than what I expected. I thought writing essays in college would be the same as writing in high school where I barely wrote any essays which were no more than two to three pages long. Getting good grades on those essays without doing any work or research made me feel like I was good writer, until I started writing essays for English 110 class. It was in this class where I realized, writing about something without knowing the rhetorical situations makes any writing easy because there is no purpose, audience, genre or stance behind it. Also, it is important to express a piece of writing though a media. After I learned about rhetorical situations in college, my essay writing started to improve.

The first essay I wrote for this class was a literacy narrative where I described an event that occurred after I first moved to this country and my journey to start learning about reading and writing English. When I submitted the first draft for this essay, I was not situating myself in the rhetorical situation that the writing task produced. My essay was not as good as I expected. My grammar and sentence structure were not good either. I received a lot of feedbacks from my tutor and my professor about my essay. Another thing that helped improve in my essay was peer reviews with my classmates. That was the time I learned how to read a piece of writing in someone else’s perspective. This helped me in figuring out what I was missing from my essay also if I was connecting my essay with my thesis. It took a while, but I was able to make a lot of improvements in my final draft.

For my exploratory essay, I was writing about the pros and cons of European and Western companies importing clothes from Bangladesh. During this part of the semester, I learned the significance of citation and how it can be very easy for something to be considered as plagiarism if it is not cited properly. I learned how to use MLA 8^th edition citation. The citation of my final draft was much better than the first draft because I followed the same steps I followed to improve my first essay. I reviewed it a couple times to make sure I did not make any mistakes. The revisions in my second essay made my essay much better.

For my research paper, I had to take a side and write about why European and Western companies should stop importing clothes from Bangladesh. This time, I get to learn more about using scholarly articles from the CCNY Libraries. We had one session of this class where the class was taught by a librarian from the music library. This taught so me much about CCNY’s virtual library, how and where I can access any book that I need. In this class, I learned about scholarly articles which I used in my research paper. Another very important website that helped me cite sources is Purdue Owl. Without this website, I would never be able to learn how to cite properly in detail. This is the first class where I learned how Blackboard works. Through this website, I was able to receive all my grades, and receive all the important announcements from the professor. I submitted all my work I have done for this class through Blackboard. Finally, the last assignment of the class is making a portfolio for all my past assignments. In the beginning, I was not feeling good about making the portfolio, but now I really like it. I like the way I can play around with my portfolio to make it look interesting and organized. I learned how to create path, relationships, adding tags, and importing media files. Using all these functions made my portfolio design simple and easy to navigate. I have inserted background and key images in each page of my portfolio which represents what my assignment is about. Two things I really liked about making a scalar account is uploading music and inserting a map from Google. Making this portfolio was a completely different experience and I learned a lot.

Altogether, English 110 taught me a lot about making improvements to my writing as well as help me make proper citation for the work I have used from the internet. In this class throughout the semester, I have learned much more than what I was expecting to learn. Overall, as a writer, I feel like I have made many improvements. English 110 has taught me how important reviewing a paper is before the submission. Because of this class, it has become very easy for me to catch my own mistakes. I have improved in writing reports for my engineering classes because of this class. I believe that making improvements were possible because of professor Pringle, my peers and my dedication in becoming a better writer.