Twaseen Mazumder
Professor Mcintosh
FIQWS 10108
12/2/20
Self-Assessment
In this course, I believe that my skills in writing have greatly improved from the beginning of the semester all the way up till now with the help of various assignments and essays as well as the discussion posts. I feel that one area which I have distinctly improved in has been essay writing. When I received feedback from my first try on the Source Based Essay, I realized on the spot that I had been placing too much focus on summarizing sources and talking about the general topic I chose, which was Islamophobia, instead of analyzing the rhetorical situation more in depth. This is shown in my first draft, when I initially wrote in my first body paragraph “We can see present-day examples of Islamophobia simply through the American federal government, in which President Donald Trump issued an executive order during early 2017 banning the immigration of Muslims from 7 Muslim-majority countries, them notably being Syria, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen.” In this section alone it is clear that I was taking an approach that relied on summarizing the content of the cited passages. By realizing this, I completely changed the way I began the paragraph and dived straight into the rhetorical situation instead. This allowed me to end up beginning the paragraph with “ Firstly, in the paper “The Impact of Islamophobia on the Muslim American Community…” by Areeza Ali, the main purpose is to inform people of the impact Islamophobia has on the Muslim American community through psychological suffering, identity crises, and traumatic incidents. This can be seen as Ali directy states what her purpose is, in the line “The purpose of this study was to explore and analyze the perceived psychological impact of Islamophobia experienced by Muslim Americans.” Ali’s target audience is primarily for non-Muslim Americans who are unaware of what Muslim Americans are going through due to Islamophobia, which she shows through her well used word choice.” Here, I cited the source immediately and began analyzing who the target audience was based upon the text.
In addition to that, I improved the way I understood the rhetorical situation of a passage as a whole starting with the very first discussion “The Dangers of Tipping while Black”. The way I started my discussion was “In “The Dangers of Tipping While Black” by Hari Ziyad, the rhetorical situation is that black people have to deal with severe discrimination constantly due to them paying low tips when they cannot afford to pay more. Ziyad narrates his own personal story, in which he and a friend encountered a waiter who got mad over their tip although it was the right amount because it seemed too small for her.” In this section, I paraphrase what the author says within his passage, but I failed to include any citation or evidence regarding his statements. Later on, in the discussion revolving around Robin DiAngelo’s passage about “White Fragility”, I wrote “ In the article, it says that “Further, on the cultural level, being an individual or being a human outside of a racial group is a privilege only afforded to white people. In other words, people of color are almost always seen as “having a race” and described in racial terms (“the black man”) but whites rarely are (“the man”), allowing whites to see themselves as objective and non-racialized.” In this discussion, I cite evidence directly from the passage itself and go on to explain how it ties into white people having privileges reserved solely for them. This helps to show where I got my statements from and significantly supports the strength of my arguments.
Overall, this class greatly helped me develop my skills further in utilizing/analyzing evidence in depth, and a better understanding of rhetorical situations which I was able to incorporate in my discussion posts and essays as well as peer reviews.
