Assignment 5: Semester Self-Reflection
Overview: This assignment asks you to compose a final, informal essay that reflects critically
on the reading, writing, and thinking youve done this semester and how your awareness of the
rhetorical situation has shaped your writing and learning processes. This final, informal essay
will tell a story, or a narrative, of your progress through the course and explore how you will use
the knowledge and skills you gained in CO150 in the future.
Purpose: Your purpose for writing this final, informal essay is twofold: to look back at the
progress youve made this semester and look forward to how you can use the skills you gained in
CO150 in the future. In looking back at the class, you will reflect on what youve learned over
the course of the semester as weve developed greater understanding of the rhetorical situation
and progressed through the stages of the conversation model, then you will articulate that
progress using critical rhetorical terms. As you look ahead to the rest of your college career, you
will consider how the knowledge youve gained in CO150, including what youve learned about
your own writing processes, will assist you in future endeavors.
Audience: Your audiences for this assignment are yourself and your instructor. Because this is a
self-reflection of your progress in the course, you are writing in large part for your own benefit
so that you can understand where you began the course, where you ended it, how you got there,
and what you can take with you in the future. Your audience is also your instructor. Although
your instructor has read and is familiar with the work that youve done throughout the semester,
remember that it will be important to demonstrate for your instructor that you are able to
articulate in specific rhetorical terms the ways that you approached this semesters work, and that
youre able to illustrate this story with concrete evidencesuch as quotes and paraphrases
from your own body of work. You will therefore be critically reading and critically thinking
about your own work over the course of the semester.
Author: In many ways, this assignment emphasizes your role as a writer more so than any of
the others since you and your work are central to this assignments investigation and analysis. As
the author of this document, you will demonstrate for your reader that you have carefully
examined the work youve done this semester and considered both how individual tasks built on
each other and how the rhetorical situation throughout impacted the decisions you made as a
writer. To establish your ethos with your audience, you will need to integrate several concrete
examples from your own work as you discuss your progress during the semester.
Texts to Examine and Questions to Consider:
Course readings:
What was your initial response to texts?
How did subsequent texts change your impression of them?
What questions arose from these texts?
How did these questions motivate your research in Unit 3?
Major assignments:
A1: Summary/Response
A2: Open Letter
A3: Stakeholder Analysis
A4: Academic Argument
Strategies:
Start by reviewing all your final versions of Assignments 1-4. Also look at workshop
feedback and instructor comments.
Begin making chronological notes that chart your progress as a writer who is increasingly
aware of the rhetorical situation and how that awareness is integrated into your writing in
various ways as the semester progresses.
As you review your body of work, pick out quotations and paraphrases that show how
you evolved as a critical reader, thinker, and writer throughout the semester. Use this as
evidence in your paper. You can cite this as a modified MLA style, indicating the
assignment in parentheses after the quotation or paraphrase.
Write a reflection that expresses this evolution, especially of critical rhetorical
approaches.
Include the answer to the following question: How do you best function as a writer and
how will this knowledge carry you through your academic career?
Paper Length: approximately 1000 words
Due Date: Friday, May 13th, by 11:59 p.m. MDT
Worth: 10% of your final course grade
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