INSTRUCTIONS: Help me Write a 1000-1200 wordcount NARRATIVE ESSAY that assesses your First Year Writing learning experiences and tells the story of your collegiate journey from coming into the course way back in January 2023, up until now, May 2023.

HERE ARE SOME SUGGESTIONS WHICH YOU MAY COMBINE and/or ORDER ANYWAY YOU WISH. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ADDRESS ALL OF THESE SUGGESTIONS; YOU MAY ALSO CHOOSE OR CREATE ANOTHER FOCUS WHICH IS IMPORTANT TO SHOWCASING YOUR GROWTH AS A WRITER AND COLLEGE STUDENT. UP TO YOU:

• For instance, you might write about what differences are like between high school and college writing assignments, or between high school and college experiences in a composition class. You might write about your time management skills in FYW, your FYW study habits, and how well (or not) you navigated a writing-intensive college course. In other words, what you're learning about your own developing work ethic.
• You might write about all of your learning around a few of the different genres you have written in for FYW, including (as per the order of our course) personal narrative writing; reflection writing; project proposal writing; source annotations; ethnographic fieldnotes; and ethnography writing.
• You might write about doing social research: going to fieldsites; doing observations; gathering informant or interview data.
• You might write about how different course texts and their authors have influenced or inspired your work in specific assignments.
• You might write about such writing concepts as rhetoric, Kairos, and balance.
• You might write about what you are learning about specific writing techniques, i.e., the importance of drafting; of strong paragraphing; of pacing and ordering a narrative's scenes or an essay's evidence; formatting dialogue; introducing and signaling sources; quoted evidence framing and integration; paraphrasing evidence; drawing warrants via analysis (i.e., evaluation, interpretation, etc., of outside evidence); MLA and APA styles; MLA and APA citation styles; location, summarizing and evaluating sources; selecting evidence to form an argument; drawing conclusions; development of a thesis.
• You might also write about your understanding of the Course Goals, as published in our course syllabus (see below*). In fact, if you choose to focus your narration on them, it would serve you well to focus on only 3-4 of these goals to frame your story.

As always, gather and organize your evidence before you draft. You cannot address everything within 1000-1200 words. Select. Focus.

Please compose in MSWord or Google Docs then copy-and-paste your composition directly into this forum. Per university requirements for FYW, this essay is to be about YOU and YOUR learning journey, not about the course or me.

*If you wish to use any of them, here are our syllabus' FYW COURSE GOALS:

After taking FYW, students will...

1. Recognize that writing is a social activity, a matter of experimenting with the rhetorical conventions of different genres and negotiating the expectations of audiences.

2. Use technology to design and share information across multiple communities.

3. Engage writing as an epistemic and recursive process and apply a variety of knowledge-making strategies in writing.

4. Understand that academic disciplines employ varied genres, styles, syntactical patterns, uses of evidence, and documentation practices that call for a variety of reading strategies.

5. Demonstrate the ability to locate, critically evaluate, and employ a variety of sources for a range of purposes.

6. Build cross-cultural connections and relationships with others to solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought.

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NOTE: Due to final grading, I cannot review any student's self-assessment draft before submission.

GRADING: The self-assessment essay will be graded on how well it is:narrated (voice); organized (how content is measured and where it is placed); edited (including the selection of your experiential evidence for content); paced (how much content is delivered); paragraphed; and how well the essay "adds up" your experiences to draw its conclusions, as well as whether you proofread and meet or exceed the wordcount (i.e., 1000-1200 words). YOU DO NOT HAVE TO CITE (unless you incorporate outside source quotes or paraphrases, of course).