This semester was hard for me, mainly because I had to spend a lot of my time concentrating on doing other things. I entered this class and I knew it was going to be hard, not because I was not going to enjoy it or because I was not prepared to do the work assigned, but because I knew I would have to adjust my time a lot.

I am someone who does not like to be late to my classes, and naturally, I don’t like being absent either. This semester though, I had to miss a lot of classes and do my best to still do the work while working on other assignments from other classes. I say English can be complicated because for me, writing is something that requires a lot of thinking, and therefore a lot of time. When you combine this with the need to do research and select articles and gather information, it ends up being really time consuming. Thankfully, my professor this semester was very generous with the amount of time that she games us to finish these assignments. I managed to submit almost all my assignments on time thanks to this, but i did have to spend some nights working on some of them. What I’m trying to say is that something I learned this semester is how to manage my time better, which is something I’m sure I will need as I keep progressing here in ccny.

I realized I needed to learn how to prioritize some stuff when we got the details for our second big assignment: The Digital ethnography. This assignment was the hardest, because it required us to take our time doing research and analyzing social behaviors withing certain groups of our choice. I took me almost 3 days before I could gather all the information I needed, and I still needed to figure out how to use that information for this assignment. Although it was the hardest, and the one who took more time to complete, it teacher me some new ways to approach writing. I realized I used to write a lot of my papers relaying a lot on my own voice and my own experiences and then supporting whatever claim I could form with the evidence I got from research. However, while I was doing this assignment, I was constantly having to analyze the social group I chose and was constantly forced to use those observations to create my claims and opinions, rather than just using my own.

This, along with the first assignment, which required us to interview someone and then include their opinions and ideas about specific social issues, was what helped me realize I needed to learn how to find balance between my voice, and the voice of the person I’m quoting while writing. I received some feedback about this issue on my first assignment, and I believe I was able to fix this after trying a few more times.

Something else I learned Is how to do research in a more effective way. As I have been saying, time management is really important when writing, so being able to identify potential sources makes your job easier. I learned about this during our workshop on the library. I already knew about the ccny library, but I only managed to understand how it works after the workshop took place. We were introduced to things like google scholar and then were told how to use key words to get specific articles related to our topic of research. This was particularly helpful because it saved me some time for my second big assignment, which relied a lot on outside sources, and scholarly sources. It also helped me understand how to use the ccny online library, which can be very confusing sometimes.

Finally, this class allowed me to understand there’s is different ways in which we can use writing to express something or convince people about something specific. It almost makes it seem like there is no correct way of writing, but only different approaches depending on who your audience is. For each of the assignments, I had to use different writing strategies that could be used for the other ones but would not have the same impact on the audience. Some are more focused and pathos and appeal to emption, while other are more focused on ethos and logos, which appeal to logic and reasoning. I also managed to see that you can also be creative when writing. Sometimes being funny or sarcastic can make your ideas easy to read, which makes it easier for the reader to be engaged and understand your ideas better.