This course has allowed me to think more deeply about social and political issues, testing how I convey topics involving communities in different forms and to various audiences. While I felt this would be your typical writing class, my first assignment, “Transcultural Interview Essay and Commentary,” caught me off guard. I was accustomed to argumentative or opinionated essays, so I was intrigued when I was tasked with interviewing another individual and telling their truth in my writing. Taking a step back in an essay and not giving your opinion is hard. In this course, I was introduced to the idea of field workers who observe and describe daily life. As a field worker, I had to learn how to navigate spaces to understand the dynamics and misconceptions of communities better.

It was engaging how we tackled essays through a more socio-cultural or political lens. My Transcultural assignment set the tone for how I would start to view culture, identity, and language. Although I needed to step back to understand and describe the communities within my writing pieces, commentary after every essay allowed me to write more opinionated responses and formulate a stance. Keeping things neutral in an essay almost felt like a story exchange, fostering understanding through my writing and storytelling. I never thought about how biased standard essays can be swaying a person one way or another. Keeping information in my transcultural essay neutral and only leaving my opinion for the end strengthened my summarizing and paraphrasing skills, as with my conversation with Gabriella, I didn’t give my opinion on what she had told me, but rather explained my findings and what she believed and said in my own words.    

In this course, I gave and received feedback more purposefully. Through class discussions on what makes a good comment on a student’s work, we reflected on how to respond to my peers in a respectful and helpful way. Within class conversation, we often analyzed and quoted peers’ work as a reference point to make stronger drafts in writing, such as for the Field Observation Essay. Integrating my findings on how my classmates structure their work opened my eyes to how to set a better tone and clarity for my final product.  The encouragement to use resources like the writing center allowed me to create better edits within my work, and with the discussions already being had in class, I had a strong draft that I could work on. Readings such as “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan showed me the importance of knowing who my audience is and how to speak to them. Coming into this course, I’ve always seen writing as something that must be presented in one formal way. I was more used to doing things the “right” way than thinking about how my audience would read and understand it. The course allowed me to lay out goals for my writing and what my professor expects of me. I also practiced reading, drafting, revising, and editing through my transcultural, field observation and literature review essays. 

When peer reviewing for my Field Observation Essay, I noticed a noticeable linguistic difference in how we tackled this assignment. My peer, Shadia Sultana, incorporated a group that spoke a different language for her online community observation. I found this interesting, as my focus was on Taylor fans who spoke English, so my research didn’t have that apparent linguistic diversity. Although my online group only spoke English, for this assignment, I found two communities (Discord and Reddit) expressing themselves differently about the same topic. This exposed me to linguistic differences through tone and structure. My topic discussing these two groups changed my perspective. It allowed me to gain rhetorical sensibility by viewing how each community uses language and tone to connect through shared values.

The literature review pushed me to use formatting and set my goals for these assignments properly. My topic for this assignment was fashion, Chinese foot binding, corsets, and the humiliation women have faced for wearing pants. At first, I was unsure how I wanted to explain my topic. I didn’t want to talk about fashion and misogyny within fashion because that was too broad, but I also didn’t want to talk about Chinese foot binding because I felt trapped in just one conversation. Picking three examples of women’s fashion allowed me to speak and connect my writing to more than just Chinese foot binding while still making sure it’s not too broad. My brainstorming and Annotated Bibliography helped me a lot in terms of connecting and structuring my essay to incorporate heavy amounts of information. My goal through all of my essays was to educate and create an understanding beyond my opinion. In my Multi-Modal Translation & Rationale, I was able to better connect and educate my audience on my topic. My translation became a poem which I articulated in a way that allowed my audience to think/question  “what is it to be a lady”. This question was thrown around a lot in my essay, and through the Q&A, I emphasized this question by asking how it made them feel and how we can see misogyny in womens fashion today. These questions were answered through engaging my audience with my poem “What it means to be a lady” which fostered curiosity and allowed me to display my knowledge. This discussion provided a space for honest reflection on my findings and overall work. 

Compared to my other essays, my literature review was stricter in how my sources were cited, as my other essays were more focused on online groups and interviews, not finding information in the CCNY database. Using APA formatting and the CCNY database for sources is typical in ELA classes, yet is often done wrong, which was explained in this course. The idea of using sentence cases or the author’s name and year when quoting someone is something many forget to do. I was able to develop strategies utilizing the CCNY library, operating the correct formatting procedure, such as “and” or ” or” to find the information I needed. Due to my sources being from a credible online library, my professor assured me that these were the best places to get reliable information. Using APA was challenging at first, but I was given more than enough support to push forward. Exploring various pieces of evidence online and determining how they best fit into my work to create a stronger piece of writing that fits all the needed requirements. Additionally I learned the basics of APA formatting and how we focus more on where this quote can be found with page numbers instead of who wrote the book. 

Along with this helpful information, this class allowed me to express myself in ways I never expected. The atmosphere encouraged discussions about everything from academic topics to pop culture, like conversations about fandom and what it means to be a fan. It was a surprisingly fun tangent. This class inspired me as an art minor by reminding me of the importance of self-expression in poetry and life. I had so much fun writing in this class, which is not something I say lightly, considering how much I usually dislike writing. I deeply appreciate the care and understanding this course offered, and I’ll miss the unique approach to writing that always motivated me to improve.