Savara Khan

Kelly McIntosh

FIQWS 10108

December 14, 2020

                                                            Self-Assessment 

     Comparing all my essays and discussion post from the beginning to today I now know how important this class was for me. This course taught me many skills and techniques on how to evaluate a rhetorical situation. Throughout the semester I learned how one can draw and analyze from different resources to develop a rhetorical sensibility and as an outcome, one can create an essay with many different varieties of genres and rhetorical situations. If you look back at my draft for my source-based essay it shows how on my first draft I didn’t grasp the concept of what the assignment was asking from me. I added way too much background information that wasn’t asked for and as a result, my essay looked like this:

          “Women in Islam have many rights and should be respected and treated the same way as men, Islam is a religion of peace which the Muslim people follow, and it shows the true acts of being a good human as well as shows the right way to treat the women of Islam. People don’t realize what Muslim women go through on a day-to-day basis because of the silent attacks done towards them. They can’t see how many women face racial slurs and get harassed because it’s so easy to point out that they are Muslim because of their hijab. There have been studies done that have proven the attacks done on these women must be stopped and why not a lot of people now that these attacks are even being done to these women. This also shows how many people don’t know the true meaning behind the word hijab and just see it as an oppressive manner done towards the Muslim women. Many people even started creating public speaking events as well as public social media accounts for the people looking from outside the religion to learn what being a Muslim woman in Islam is really about.”  

   After I realized and understood what I needed to add to my essay, it completely changed. I was told how and what I needed to improve on. My essay turned from an essay about background information with some rhetorical analysis to a rhetorical analysis essay. I added and describe the rhetorical elements which included the author and audience, tone and purpose, genre and medium, and stance and language–of all four of my sources and back up my rhetorical elements with evidence to prove my claims. My reading strategies for my resources changed when I started looking for key rhetorical terms and I understood the use of digital technologies to address a range of audiences in the different sources I was using. I started to pay more attention to how I would draft, revise, and edited my final assignment. My final essay was completely different from my draft and turned into what a rhetorical essay should look like:

     “Thirdly, “The Woman of Islam”, by author, Lisa Beyer, is sourced from Time Magazine. The audience the author is trying to reach out to are the non-Muslim people to inform them about Islam and how Muslim women get treated. The purpose of this article was to persuade the audience that Islam is discriminative to women despite describing Prophet Muhammad as a “feminist”. The author’s tone is persuasive because she uses cultural and traditional practices done in conservative places to persuade the audience into believing that Islam is discriminative to women.  Her stance was clearly towards blaming “the religion” for entrenching “inequality”. Evidence of such claim was an example of some practices in certain countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait that reinforce “subjugation of the female sex”. The language that was used is informal and simple, suitable for the general public comprehension level. The author calls out his audience to believe in the traditional and cultural believes of some as part of the religion. Which is false from the truth and the author doesn’t use facts and reliable resources to express what Islam is truly like and how women of Islam should be treated according to the religion.“

    This self-assessment assignment has put a lot of things into perspective. I can now say that I can locate different research sources in the library’s databases or archives and on the Internet and also evaluate them based on credibility, accuracy, timeliness, and biasness. I can evaluate and compose a text that can integrate my stance with different appropriate sources using different strategies such as a summary, critical analysis, or argumentation. I would always look forward to collaborating with my classmates and hearing their responses about my assignment, it would give me a new outlook on what I have created through a different point of view. Throughout this semester I wrote different essays which include a source-based essay, composition in two genres, and a critical analysis essay. I won’t say I am an excerpt in writing these types of assignments, but I can say I am way better than I once was and because of this course I have learned and grown as a writer and as a reader. I realized the importance of this course after this self-assessment because I have developed strategies that help me in my reading, creating my drafts, collaborating in discussions post, different ways of editing my final assignments, and properly citing my work.