Bayan Demis  

Professor Franco Russell  

English 110- Freshman Composition  

December 9th, 2025 

Final Reflection Essay 

English 110 Freshman Composition classes were full of learning and fun. Each class added to my knowledge about the English language and introduced new concepts connected to different kinds of academic writing. Every phase mainly emphasizes working on a specific skill and helping us either obtain or improve that skill.  

One of the most important things I learned was how rhetoric works in academic writing. I learned what parts a rhetorical text should cover, such as audience, purpose, and the author’s credentials. At the beginning of the semester, we read pieces that helped us understand this skill, including Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue”, which discusses challenges immigrants face when communicating with the outside world. She shares moments and personal dialogue to connect with her audience, which was mainly immigrants or children of immigrants. Choosing my own target audience helped me determine the style, tone, and message of my writing. For example, in my language and literacy essay, I wrote with empathy and support toward English learners. Still, in my synthesis essay, where I discussed a broader social issue in the United States, I had to be more straightforward and not include my personal thoughts. These rhetorical skills applied not only to our essays but also to everything we created, including visual arguments.  

Another interesting concept I learned was translating a written text into a spoken or visual piece that could reach a wider audience. I honestly don’t remember doing something like this before, so being introduced to it was really valuable. In the first translation activity, we had to convert our writing into spoken material, like an oral presentation. That process helped me pay attention to how format, tone, and the way we deliver a message can change depending on the medium. Speaking gave me more room for creativity and self-expression compared to writing, which feels more structured and restricted. Even though I am more comfortable with writing, trying something different was beneficial. The second translation activity was creating a visual piece, more like a promotional poster about a social issue. This was very different because the ideas had to be simple, clear, and direct, and the space was limited, so I had to choose only the strongest evidence.  

This semester helped me understand how to use sources in a clearer and more accurate way, especially when writing about social and linguistic issues. The library workshop and the MLA lessons were helpful because they showed me how to choose credible sources and how to cite them correctly, which was something I always felt unsure about. Even though I had some past experiences finding resources and integrating evidence from writing lab reports, working on these assignments was completely different. Instead of scientific writing, I had to use those same research skills to talk about a social issue, and that pushed me to think more carefully about how evidence actually supports an argument. Even though these essays didn’t use my personal voice, they taught me how to stay organized, focused, and intentional when building an academic argument.  

This class also helped me see language in a completely different way. I learned that language is not only something we use to communicate, but something that carries people’s history and identity. Through collecting my data and sources for my synthesis essay, I was able to see how some ways of speaking are judged, and how those judgments come from ideas that people don’t even realize are repeating. Learning about language discrimination and linguistic racism made me understand how unfair it is that certain dialects, especially African American English, are treated in schools. I also started noticing how these ideas have been part of the education system for a long time, even if teachers don’t mean to do it. All of this made me think more carefully about how powerful language is and how it affects people every day.  

Finally, I want to mention the analysis skills I developed this semester. I started to understand how to look more closely at a reading and pay attention to what the author is trying to communicate. The worksheets we did for each reading helped me the most because they guided me to break down the text, think about the author’s choices, and connect the ideas to the bigger topic we were discussing. After doing this repeatedly, I noticed that I started applying the same kind of analysis when I wrote my own essays, and it made my writing clearer and more thoughtful.