My self-reflecting essay

Getting Confidence
In September 2006, when I immigrated to the US, I knew just a few simple phrases in English and could write very little. For a long time I avoided meeting people because I couldn’t have even a simple conversation with them. And three years later, I’m in the English-1010 class, and am writing a self-reflective essay.
On the first day of the class, I was a little uncomfortable among my native English-speaking classmates. Would I be up to the task? But after our professor introduced himself and announced our course outline, I felt that I could do it--step by step, and with a lot of hard work.
Our first assignment, a reflective memoir, was a very interesting project. First, I had just a general idea about the topic, but didn’t have any clue how to write that essay. But in class, we learned how to ask the right questions and answer them, how to use free-writing to pick vivid details and develop them, how to organize effective writing and consider the audience, how to revise our drafts, etc. Using my new knowledge, I came from the point of “I don’t even know where to start” to the final product. In course of the project, I got a lot of help from different people—my husband, my peers, my tutors in the ESL lab and the Writing Center, and, of course, from my instructor. Their constructive feedback helped me to make my final paper strong and interesting.
All the writing methods I learned during my first assignment were also helpful for my next papers. But there were some new challenges for me. For example, in the film review assignment, the most difficult part was the critical analysis where I–not an expert in cinematography--had to evaluate the film director’s and actors’ work. Eventually, after participating in the class work and reading many published film reviews, I began to understand the main points of critical analysis.
The main difficulties in the third assignment, rhetorical analysis, were recognizing the rhetorical techniques the two writers I chose to review used, and justifying my choice of the most successful rhetoric. Also, my instructor’s audio feedback on this assignment turned out to be a challenge because I couldn’t understand some words in his message—so again I needed help from others. Overall, what I’d learned from this assignment is that rhetoric is a very important writing tool—it can serve to reinforce sound logic, but can also sometimes conceal the author's biases, preferences and subjectivity.
The last assignment was even more challenging because it was a group project. My additional difficulty was the necessity to communicate with the members of my team as we progressed towards our goal. Yet soon I began to see that in some respects I was very helpful to our joint efforts. Group work is complicated, especially at the beginning--people are all different, they don't know each other, and often have very different ideas. The ultimate group success depends on how well all members can communicate and participate. At first, our group couldn’t decide on a topic narrow enough for this assignment. Our next problem was too many sources and too much information to go through. How to choose what would best support our thesis? We had to apply the knowledge we’d acquired in the class—we examined our assignment, stated the problem we wanted to discuss, made an outline, used brainstorming and free-writing, and then picked the most interesting ideas, details and examples. To make our writing effective and reach our goal in persuading readers to act, we applied rhetoric—ethos (we tried to be objective and used reliable sources, statistics, and facts), pathos (we appealed to the readers’ sense of civic responsibility), and logos (by using vivid examples, statistics, and logical reasoning). What I liked most in the group work was the democratic nature of the decisions we made--we collectively discussed all the ideas and decided on the best to go into our paper. We all thought and read critically which helped our work. As always, peer review and our instructor’s feedback were very helpful—based on them, we revised our writing and fixed the mistakes.
The class is almost finished, and looking back, I can say that it was a very good one for me. I’ve learned many things that I’d never thought about. Critical reading, summarizing, analysis, evaluation, rhetoric—they all help us to effectively express our own thoughts and to understand the writing of others. By learning these essentials, I continue to build a strong English language base for my new future and to expand my own world. Everything I’ve learned during this semester will provide me with more confidence in my future academic activities and life in the new culture in general. This class has helped me to take a few important steps towards my goals, but I still have a lot of work ahead of me.