My Self-Assessment Essay
Abstract
This essay as the title specifies is based on my self-assessment throughout the course. I talk about my experience as a social science writer, the things that I have learned, and progressed at, the goals I have achieved and what the favorite part of this class has been for me. I also talked about how some of the perceptions I have academically and outside of it have evolved thanks to this class, my observations and analyses.
What is writing? To me, writing is the art of self-expression, the art of creativity, it is a dimension where anything can be possible. It is the art to give life to unborn-nonexistent things, the art of giving voice with no sound, of providing scenarios with no images, of offering the ability to almost smell, taste, or sense something without being physically present. Writing is also the art of capturing moments, information and narratives others tell. It is the manifestation of vivid memories, storytelling, and information capturing all in one. Depending on what type of writing is presented each will always have a purpose… Some writings/text’s purpose is to convey, others to engage and entertain and others to analyze investigate and record information, amongst others of course, but regardless of what the type of writing is, each portrays an identifiable message. This is my response to one of the questions presented under the assignment instructions; “What is writing?”.
The purpose of this class being so a social science class, was to analyze, record and express the information collected, this implies conducting interviews, and observations. Throughout my years of writing, I have always been accustomed to one specific type of writing, which has been the entertaining writing, those writings where I must create a story, or a poem or something as such. I was never accustomed to write for any sciences, nor was I accustomed to write based on specific observations and conversations conducted with people. In the following paragraphs I will be sharing my experiences as a social scientist writer, the things I learned, the things I improved in, the things I felt most conscious about writing before I started and how I managed that, things that I think changed/ progressed or not throughout my writings for this class and outside of it, and new perspectives I have acquired amongst others. To prove all these points, I will be using my own writings for this class as a reference to support each statement.
Learning objectives and writing overtime
First, I will start by saying that before I did any of the assignments and during the process of it, what I was most nervous about was conducting an interview, recording the information, and transferring all the analyzations, observations, and conversation into a good piece of work/writing. The interview assignment was called “Transcultural Interview” Although I had already conducted a first interview in the class with one of the classmates; called : Peer Interview, what I felt most nervous and self-conscious about, was conducting the transcultural interview, this was due to the fact that not only was I to interview somebody about their life and the things I wanted to know about them, but that in this case the person who I interviewed had to be someone with a different culture, or subculture to mine. Recording and writing these interactions about such a specific objective had me terrified, and self-conscious about my own writing skills. Although this was the assignment, I was most nervous about it turned out to be one of my best. Conducting an interview, recording information and paraphrasing sentences, or even directly quoting are great part of what being a social scientist consists of, which is exactly what this assignment meant to teach us, and which of course I learned from and was able to acquire one more skill as a writer that I certainly did not have before, the skill of writing in different genres and implementing one’s conversation so fluently as if telling a story.
The most meaningful assignment.
If I had to choose between my assignments and choose the most meaningful, I would definitely have to mention the transcultural interview again, and another assignment which is titled under the coursework as; “Meaningful writing”. On the first hand I found the transcultural interview to be one of the most significant assignments for the semester, not only because I conquered the fear of conducting and recording on paper an interview, but because the subculture topic I chose for the interview is profoundly meaningful and intimae to me. In my essay of the transcultural interview, called: A Decade of Self- Discovery, I said; “I chose to interview Ella because I believe her culture/ subculture is one of the least acknowledged topics out there.”(Peña, 2021) I interviewed Ella about her sexuality, focusing on how her life as a heterosexual woman in her entire life or so she believed, was it to discover she was also attracted to women, ad how did this feel coming from a strict family, and with a boyfriend whom she has been dating for 10 years. This was especially significant to me because I am a gay woman who also comes from a strict family but that is out, and majority of my life I have known and accepted the attractions I feel towards my same sex. Moving on my second most meaningful assignment, as the title indicates was, “Meaningful writing”. This was an important piece for me because in this essay I got to express and talk about one of my most personal writings, which is a poetry I wrote a couple of years ago and which I am most proud of, titled “Protesto”. Under this assignment I expressed “. I knew inside me this piece would be so important because even though writing has always been part of my being, I had never experienced the sudden compulsion of putting together so many words with such meaning behind!” (Peña, 2021) Being able to write even a little about me and one of the projects I feel most contempt about even if it was informally, was meaningful to me because aside from learning many other things in class as a social scientist finding meaningful pieces of writing by myself made it easier for me to find meaning in each conducted observation for every assignment, because there was also great significance behind each assignment.
Writing approaches and Goals throughout the semester
As I mentioned before all my life, my way of writing has always relied more on the creative side whether this be academically or for personal matters. The way my writings would function in and out of school would always consist of creative writing such as stories, poetry or essay and character analysis from books, along with working with dialogs. But I had never had the opportunity to work with real and live recorded dialogues between myself and someone else. My goal for this class specifically was to have fun while I was learning distinct ways of writing, and or researching at the same time. Since I am a psychology major with great interest in literature this was meant to be my “fun to go to” class, which indeed met my expectations. I had fun learning new implementations and forms of writings, things outside from the things I was used to working on. This course strengthens my capability of utilizing quotes better analyzing and summarizing thoughtfully. Since I met my goals during this semester and felt like I did great progress on my writing in terms of negotiating my own goals/ or preference of writing for the readers’ expectations, I did not feel like there was something that held me back or something I did not make progress in. I feel like in all my final essays I expanded and touched on the topics pretty well. Something I did notice though in which I made great improvement was in including headings for each paragraph for some of the essays, which helped me with the clarity of the essay, and helped guide the reader more. If we take for instance my first essay “Peer Interview essay” and compare it to my second essay, my “Sense of Place” essay, we see that in the first one I did not utilize any headings on the paragraphs meanwhile for the second essay I did, this shows my improvement in y writing quality.
Favorite part of the class
My favorite part of the class has been that although we were provided with writing/ guiding prompts and expectations we were given the ability and openness to choose our own topics. This has been my favorite part of this course because it allows us to put a little bit of ourselves in each piece of work because we were able to choose based on our own interest, for example the essay about the Field site Observation, which in my case I chose to observe and research something I frequent a lot, he gym and fitness centers. Something that I wish was different about this course would be that I wish it would have been in person I know the engagement such as the peer interview would have been so much genuine and perhaps even more to learn.
I feel great about having picked this course, there is so much I have learned from it that not only will I be using in my writings and essays but in life in general. Something that was once said by the instructor throughout the semester in this class, and that I will never forget is that in a way we are all little social scientist, I myself can confirm me because the way we go to places analyze the people, their behaviors and the environment and sometimes even record our experiences in a little diary, this all adds up to what the work of a social scientist is, and after taking this class I am more aware of myself as I observe and think of myself as conducting my own personal observation data.
