Throughout the semester in Metenko’s Killer Stories – Writing Section class, I had some highs and lows in my work overall. There wer assignments that challenged my writing skills like the narrative essay, forced me to write highlighting an important event in my life with the use of analysis, and the exploratory essay, that challenged my research paper skills. I don’t think that I made any huge improvements in my skills as a writer but I definitely improved as a learner and how to go about my process of writing an essay for an English course at City College.

For the first assignment, the narrative essay that I had very little experience with only every writing one narrative for my high school honors English 2 class as a sophomore. So I didn’t know how to approach the writing for this assignment and avoided the assignment until a few day before the due date of the draft. Using my observations from reading memoirs, autobiographies, and other stories that focuses on a character’s development to dictate my writing style for my narrative.

This was my first rough draft for my narrative that I decided to write in third person to mimic a fairytale story, since majority love fairytale stories and I wanted to transform a traumatic event that changed my life for good into like one of fairytale stories we read when we are kids. Though it was hard for me to start, I knew that instantly I wanted to be ironic and vague in a sense about my character and her story, I wanted to slightly imitate authors I have read like Franz Kafka and George Orwell. For my first peer review, I didn’t have printed copies of my draft but I did have a pictures of my writing and showed them and my classmates expressed how they liked that I chose to go a different, creative path of writing in 3rd person. This peer review feedback gave me more confidence and motivation to finish my narrative essay, although my initial intentions were to make it a short story, so I had to get more creative and think more out of the box for continuing the story beyond the intended ending.

After giving in my finished narrative essay and looking over the feedback by my professor Metenko, as I expected, he gave me feedback to give more details and be more specific in my writing to emphasize the lost of innocence of the little girl in my story. Although my intentions were to be vague, I actually really appreciate the feedback that he gave me because I could’ve gone into detail about certain scenes and objects to enhance the innocence of the little girl. Although my intentions were to be vague, I actually really appreciate the feedback that he gave me because I could’ve gone into detail about certain scenes and objects, like the cartoons, to enhance the innocence of the little girl. Through Metenko’s feedback I was able to acknowledge my strength in figurative language of specifically metaphors and similies in my narrative above, but also acknowledge my weakness in details. Overall, I feel that this feedback will help guide me in my future narrative responses.
The next and personally my most difficult assignment is the exploratory essay. When I say that this
essay was my most difficult, I’m being real by that I have never written a research paper before
because I never had an English class assign me one, so it was like stepping onto new territory. It was
easy to pick a topic and make a research question, but finding scholarly sources and where to focus
in my topic is were I struck my head. At first, I wanted to talk about everything under the patriarchy,
the topic of my choice for my essay, and Metenko helped me find my focus of issues under the
patriarchy to talk about in my essay.

The City College Library website is confusing for me to navigate because I’ll search the topic of what I’m looking for and I’m given a few sources that’s addressing my search with the rest being science based. It was confusing and frustrating for me to use the website, especially when there would be no online sources available and ended having to get my sources from google because at least google was giving me faster results. Despite Metenko going over the use of scholarly sources, I feel that finding scholarly sources are one of my weak points and haven’t learned that well during my fall semester in this course.

Moving along to my last essay assignment for Killer Stories – Writing Section class, the CRA essay, which in was the easiest for me to navigate, since I have a lot of experience and feedback from doing critical analysis essays in past English classes taken in high school. My approach to writing the essay is the same by that I wrote my thesis, in which could be proven wrong, first then found evidence from the text of my choice, which was Maria Conceptión by Katherine Anne Porter, to support my thesis. I used those few simple steps to set up the outline of my essay, leaving only the claim and analysis left to be written. But I was met again with the same challenge I faced when writing my exploratory essay, finding scholarly sources. Except this time I had the help of a teammate to navigate City College Library for sources about the story Maria Conceptión by being more specific in what I type in the search bar, which I’ll be using to help in future assignments requiring scholarly sources.

If I’m being honest about this essay, it’s not my best critical analysis essay and shows that there’s still room for me grow in this area. I got a B on this assignment, which isn’t bad, but I know I could’ve done a lot better. But, adding scholarly sources really messed me up in this assignment because I didn’t know how to properly embed my external evidence into my body paragraph without making my writing sound awkward.

Metenko’s class was amusing and knowledgeable, but I didn’t really learn many new things, just reinforcing of ideas and steps or processes from developing an idea to executing it. I feel that we could’ve focused more on external sources rather then having an online class with another professor teaching us about that topic, especially since majority of students don’t pay full attention to their online classes. The class could have focused more on exploratory essay concept and cra essay because not every student knows how to go about those assignments to fit the teacher’s requirements of good writing.

Overall, my writing skills have stayed stagnant in my opinion by that my approach to writing has stayed the same and my analytical skills are the same, but sometimes I don’t execute them properly in my writing by I may lack details or crowded sentences. Although my reading skills have improved a little but I still need to read texts twice at least in order to grasp majority or even all of details, since I naturally analyze/stories as I read them and make mental or physical annotations. But at least I have learned to pay extra attention to details on texts to better my understanding and the importance of clarity in my work to make it easier for the reader to process.