Asif Uddin

Professor Miller 

English 1100

May 18, 2020 

Writing Journey 

January 27 marked the first day of my English literature journey into learning and expanding the tools I use when writing or analyzing texts and understanding the importance of language and literature in our everyday lives. The last four months have taught and improved my knowledge and skills in order to boost my research incentive and opened my mind to learn more ways to include more language strategies in my writing. Throughout the semester, I learned and continuously expanded on how to use and apply language to my thinking and express it throughout my own writing. One of the very first things I learned that I found very valuable was language attitude. Language attitude has taught me how to incorporate my own opinions and ideas into my writing without turning the entire writing into something that is biased. Obtaining knowledge of Language attitudes is one of the many reasons why my Language and Literacy Narrative and my Researched Exploratory Essays were even possible, the LL Narrative was primarily set around my own personal experiences of my topic of Social Exclusion and how it essentially affected me. Language Attitude was perfect for this paper because it clearly allowed me to use my personal experience to formulate an argument, evidence, connections to real-world situations or researched events, and overall use my experience and input it in such a way that it could be backed up by reliable sources that related on the overall argument of Social Exclusion. The Exploratory Essay was an even better depiction of language attitudes as I was able to use my own experiences and opinion to formulate an argument and then moved on to be able to support that argument with reliable sources and statistically proven data. My own opinion allowed me to factually build on and expand on it while managing to remain unbiased. 

My LL Narrative essay allowed me to utilize rhetorical situations to the extent in which I went into detail of my experience with the topic which is social exclusion, and expanded on how it impacted me throughout the years, and what I did to accomplish a personal solution. This passed on to the readers enabled them to become more aware of the seriousness of social exclusion and how they can handle it if they ever experience it or know someone who is. Meanwhile, my research exploratory essay focused mostly towards the audience’s interest in the discussed topic of social exclusion, and statistical information was provided to prove overall points throughout the essay and how possible solutions could further improve the provided results

My personal strategies when it comes to reading, drafting, revising, and editing text is pretty straight forward and simple. When it comes to reading whether its a source or your completed draft, take your time to read, despite how long or boring it may be, taking your time to thoroughly read through the text, and carefully annotating important pieces of information or mark up areas that can be improved upon can direly improve the outcome f your reading. When it comes to drafting, don’t overthink it, don’t overcomplicate it, and most importantly, just write what comes to mind first, don’t try to fix errors or think if it makes sense, because most likely it doesn’t, but as long as you are getting all your thoughts at the moment down on paper, you will have time to edit and fix and change any errors and bogus information that doesn’t belong or doesn’t make sense later on. Now focusing on editing, re-read, re-read,re-read, keep reading the text over and over because most of the time errors that you failed to pick up the first time you could pick up the second time and improve upon the mistake. Revising is rather simple, hand it to other individual’s and let them read through it and see how they think and feel about the text and areas of strength and weakness poised in the text, revising is the perfect time to get actual readers opinion on your work. These tactics and strategies personally work best for me and allow me to properly utilize all the time given to me for an assignment. Rhetorical terms are important and frequently used throughout my writing, in fact, its commonly used through almost everyone’s writing, and most of the time goes unnoticed. The most common rhetorical devices I used are Allusion, which is referring to a place, person, or event. Analogy, which is comparing one “fact” with another, and explaining how they are similar. And lastly, Amplification, which is the repetition of a word or a phrase for emphasis. These three rhetorical terms and many more have helped me to provide a strong engaging writing style that can quickly and efficiently grab a reader’s attention and keep them hooked for the duration of the writing. Writing these papers and focusing the topics on something that has personally impacted me in huge ways has opened up my eyes and revealed to me how far I have come personally as an individual and how far I have come as a writer, from when I first started writing back in elementary school through the next decade-plus of writing up to this very moment, with these very words. My techniques, my strategies, my time management, my analysis, all the critical points it takes to be a successful writer in any sense has changed and improved little by little. Although I won’t make false accusations that I am a perfect writer, which I am not, despite the progress and improvements I have made throughout my journey as a writer, I have yet much more to learn and accomplish. This course itself has broadened and expanded my knowledge on skills I had already known about from prior classes in high school but never had the proper opportunities to properly practice and master them. I am highly and always will be grateful for the opportunity I received from this course to further expand my language and literature knowledge as a writer and for applications in my own personal life.