Muntasir Dawan

Professor Macagnone

ENG 11000

December 6th, 2025

Word Count: 1004

First Semester Recollection

Now that I’ve reached the end of my first college semester it’s important to acknowledge the skills I’ve learned. Doing so will allow me to use these skills further down in my life. One aspect of this recollection are the skills that I’ve learned in each respective course. The course I aim to reflect on is freshman English composition, and how it helped me become a better writer and reader through the medium of essay assignments and peer reviews.

I learned to add a personal touch to my essays. I had always seen essays as something strictly formal and straight to the point. However, I learned that you should add something that actually comes from you, as opposed to a source. In my synthesis essay,  I thought that it should just be analytical and concise. Very quickly, I learned that the claim or thesis should be something you actually believe in and can say something about. It strengthens your argument while still being able to relate to the sources, thereby maintaining its validity. To quote a specific example from my synthesis essay: “Furthermore, generative AI can assist in non-academic, strictly English-concerned situations. One important caveat to note is that AI should be used as a tool, a supplement, and not used as a crutch or reliance, as is also stated by UNC in their article.”  I included the part of AI being used as a tool rather than a crutch as my own opinion, while still connecting it to a valid source. By doing so, I not only feel more connected to the prompt, I do not diminish the efficiency nor validity of the point, despite having thought that it would have before this class.

Also before this class, I used to believe that peer review was redundant and a waste of time, with the rationale that I can simply review my own work to the same level of quality as someone else, and even better. Not to mention, the quality of the feedback you receive is volatile, as it depends on the productivity of your peer reviewer. Regardless, I realized you do not lose anything by doing a peer review. Instead, you have much more to gain. Having fresh, new perspectives on your writing pieces allows you to consider your audience in your writing much more easily. Sometimes, you also just need someone to tell you that your essay is sufficient when you think it is not, or that your essay is insufficient when you think it is. When reviewing my LLN with my peers, many of them told me that they found themselves confused and lost in my words, and that I should make it simpler and compact so that it does not affect the storytelling aspect of it.

Furthermore, because of that peer review, I realized something else that encompasses all of my writing, which is that I often run-on or overcomplicate sentences to the point that the message behind them becomes muddy. I tend to overcomplicate sentences by adding lots of vocabulary words, some long, some confusing, in a way that makes me sound articulate. Not only that, but because of that flaw, my sentences run on, because I might choose a roundabout way to explain something rather than getting straight to the point efficiently. To put it in an analogy, it is like taking the scenic route rather than the most efficient route. In my synthesis essay drafts, I started many paragraphs with a lengthy sentence, causing them to run on. I tweaked them to be more concise yet accurate in further iterations. When peer reviewing my synthesis essay, my peers told me that I tended to overwhelm them when reading my sentences, as they covered too many bases at once. Noticing that I had a similar problem when initially writing my LLN, I had to step back and review how I chose to write things in general, and remember to not go overboard with sentences. Only enhancing this process was the metacognition activities we did in class. In specific, the metacognition reading response assignment helped me actually realize the merit of it, and the best methods of doing it.

Something I did not expect to learn are the struggles of having to conform to an academic standard form of English, especially for those who did not learn English as their first language. Constraining someone to a specific form of English makes it so that one cannot express their true self, and different cultures get suppressed. “Finna” by Nate Marshall is a great example of a person who felt constricted by the academic norm, as he recounts his life experiences and how he suppressed his true linguistic style to conform, he states “i let my mind tell me a million no’s that the world had implanted in me before i even formed questions” (Marshall, 2). It puts into words that I can understand the importance of dialectical language. My classmates’ translation 1’s also made me understand the perspective of people close to me who also experienced similar forms of conformity and suppression, becoming something that I could personally relate to.

Once I finally reach the end of my first semester, and beyond that, I can admit that I learned many things in this meaningful time period. The most important would be the writing routines and methods that will follow me throughout not only my college life, but also my work life. Things like being more concise with my arguments, and learning to value other people’s perspectives in terms of my own writing already have immediate value for me. Not only that, skills that are less methodical like inclusivity, especially for those that aren’t up to the “scholarly standard” in their language and team collaboration are things that will also assist me in my distant future. I am hopeful that my experiences in this class will be one of the largest factors to my success.