Writing is all about expressing your thoughts in words. Whenever we see something, our brains always start to analyze things and give us thousands of ideas. But these ideas are not organized in our brains and it seems like it is all over the place. This is when writing comes to our hands helping us expressing these unorganized thoughts to put into words in an organized way. But it is not necessary that our writing would be well organized the moment we start to write. No one writes a perfect literary work in one try. The key to a perfect writing is revising it again & again and adding or removing certain words or phrases in order to make the writing more desirable. This is the exact strategy which I use to improve my writing. I always start to put whatever comes to my mind while thinking about a specific topic on a blank sheet or google doc. After putting certain thoughts on a paper, I start to analyze things with more depth and try adding additional sentences to make the writing more understandable or I remove certain things from the writing which aren’t really necessary for that piece of writing or are irrelevant.

The first assignment I wrote for this class was a discussion board post which was about “Writing for an audience.” In this post, I wrote about how our tone and language changes while talking to different types of people and how we should write keeping in mind about who our audiences are. While writing this discussion board assignment at the beginning of the semester, I thought I had done a pretty decent job explaining the topic. But now that I have taken a look at that discussion board assignment at the end of the semester, I am realizing that the writing was very straight forward and lacks empathy. I analyzed that if I were to write the same assignment again, I would have written it in such a way that makes the reader engage with the writing in a deeper way. 

The next assignment that I wrote in this class was the  narrative essay. At first I was not sure what to write about in this essay. After reading the assignment sheet, I understood that I need to write about a natural issue I’ve experienced which is related to climate change. So I decided to write about my  experience with snowfall in New York at first but when I started to write this essay I could barely find anything to write about the experience with snowfall. I wrote two small paragraphs to sum up my idea and after writing it I realized that I will be running out of ideas if I choose this  topic to write in my narrative essay and also the essay would not be long enough to meet the certain word count. Then I decided to change this  topic and write about another experience which will turn into a significant issue related to climate change and for which I have enough things to talk about. While writing this essay, I understood that it is not necessary to stick to one topic and it is totally fine to change  the topic again and again until you get the best topic to write about. After that when I finished my narrative essay, I was satisfied that I could share my experience by turning it into writing and could find a topic for which I have a lot of things to talk about rather than choosing a topic which doesn’t have a lot to talk about. 

The next piece of writing was the Op-Ed. Before writing Op-Ed, I have written the topic proposal. As I started to look for ideas to write in my proposal, I came across the idea of writing about the negative sides of using social media since social media plays a huge role in people’s life nowadays. The topic proposal really helped me to sum up the idea I wanted to write in my op-ed. So basically my op-ed was about how social media is harming the young generation as well as making them insecure and depressed. When I wrote the first draft of the op-ed, my professor gave me some feedback. I understood that my argument was sort of straight forward and it lacked empathy. So in my final  draft, I tried to write it with more empathy. I added things from my personal life experiences to make the op-ed more empathetic. After finishing my op-ed, my professor left feedback on my paper mentioning my Op-Ed made a nice argument, it was well researched, well balanced and ends with a call to action. The reason why I could make my argument well balanced is the feedback I got on my first draft of my Op-Ed. That feedback really helped me to reconsider my argument by adding things based on the reality of social media. 

The last paper I wrote for this class was the critical analysis. In this paper, I analyzed an ad-commercial of a skin lightening cream which is called “Fair & Lovely” by turning it into an argument about how these products promoted colorism. I have created this argument based on my own life experience where I saw how people with dark skin tone get discriminated against and get called “Not Beautiful” just because of having a darker skin tone. I have researched this topic and came to a conclusion that colorism is a major issue  all over the world, especially in South Asia. So it is high time we point out this issue and raise awareness among people. 

Now that I have come to the end of the  semester, I am understanding that the most important thing I have developed throughout the semester was writing papers with empathy. Now as I look back to the very first discussion board assignment of this semester as well as the last assignment which was the critical analysis paper, I can see a major difference in explaining a topic because at the beginning of the semester I used to write things with just an explanation which lacked feelings and turned out as dry. But while writing the last paper, I believe I was able to explain the topic with emotions and the audiences could feel the motive behind my argument pretty well. This improvement has only been possible because of the feedback I received from my peers during peer review sessions and the feedback I received from my professor. Now I find writing as a way to connect my emotions to the audience. This is the best skill which I believe I have developed throughout the semester.