Although I would have liked to attend this course in person to meet my professor and my peers, I still gained a lot from this class. As our semester comes to an end, I would like to reflect on my achievements during the class. Although my biggest strength was always writing, psychopathology in literature has made me even stronger in my writing. This class has taught me to look at different aspects in literature. For example, our first assignment was to write an article analysis trying to identify 8 key rhetorical terms. Before writing our final product, our professor gave us a lot of classwork that helped us identify each element in a book, in order to accurately pinpoint key rhetorical terms in any book. This will be a very good skill to use in any other english class that i would be taking. As a writer, we understand what we’re writing and what we want to portray like an argument or opinion. However, our audience may not understand what argument or opinion we are trying to bring across. It’s important for the reader to identify key rhetorical terms but it’s as important for the writer to be able to write these key terms in order for their point to be clearly understood.

       Something valuable I learned from this course is being able to use my peers’ feedback to better my writing. Assignments that include writing about my personal experiences were always very challenging for me. When I first wrote my personal narrative, it wasn’t the best piece of writing that I could have written. However with the help of my peers I was able to change many things in my narrative. The biggest problem my first draft had was that it didn’t really include any personal experiences. My draft included only what I saw people go through instead of my own struggles. When this was pointed out to me, I had a lot of trouble putting in my personal struggles because I thought none were important enough to include in my writing. However, the more I thought about it, the more the memories came back of what it is to live as a girl in this society. The writing process is just as important as the final product. 

   Before entering this class, I had already used databases to include in science research papers. However I’ve never used databases to do research on an english paper. It was a new experience that I thought was going to be very useful for the 6 years of my education. In my writing projects i not only used the CCNY databases but i also used other internet resources to find new ideas to write and enhance my writing. It was interesting to see how much information I gained and included in my writing. Through the discussion I saw my peers have, I was interested to see that they were not using quotation marks to use quotes from the book. I enjoyed learning something new that I used in many of my writings. I found that it was easier to paraphrase rather than to find the actual quote from the book. I also found that paraphrasing helps me analyze the quote better considering that i also remember the context behind the quote that i am using. As I kept using this strategy I saw that my grade for writings has also improved. In my opinion the professor’s comments on the projects were also getting better. 

    Overall, the overall course has helped me answer one very important question, What is writing? To me this course has helped me realize the impact writing has on this world. Writing is used not only to help us express our own feelings but also teaches the audience about important issues in society. For example, there are novels that portray characters having mental illnesses and some pieces of literature that talk about the actual illness. Novels that have characters that convey mental illnesses help other people dealing with the same issue find help or solutions. Articles that have studies done on mental disorders help the audience understand what they go through and the common symptoms. To me writing is an essential part of our daily lives either writing your own struggles or reading about what you are experiencing.