My name is Aziz Nurudeen. I’m excited to tell you about how my first FIQWS course treated me throughout the fall semester of 2023. Students enrolled in this course were given three essay questions. A personal narrative, an argumentative essay, and an argumentative essay contrasting two stories were the three prompts.

I would say it was from easy to hard throughout, my first essay was pretty much easy for me since it was something that happened to me personally or because it was a story I heard about my family. 

A self-reflection on my second piece for this class was a little difficult, and it was a little confusing at first, to the point where I had to discard an entire essay in order to begin a new one with a different story. The most difficult part was determining my thesis because it was the main block/foundation of the essay, I needed a good thesis to write a better essay. Despite the difficulties, I worked harder and considered the feedback I received from peer reviews and teachers before revising my new essay. To be honest, writing this piece was really hard for me and I had to write a new essay because my old argument wasn’t strong enough. Well, I’m not the best at writing and I’ve been bad at writing and trying my best to improve my writing skills. What I found valuable in this assignment was the fact that it made me think deeper about the texts to develop a thesis statement, my thesis statement for my original argument was good but it didn’t have enough direct evidence to support it so i had to create a new thesis with a different story for my essay to be persuasive. It just gave me the chance to dig deeper into two different texts even though I only needed one to complete this assignment.

Lastly, my final paper which I had to use two stories was a little hard at first because I had to pick out two stories that had some sort of difference or similarities. The thesis part wasn’t hard to find this time since I had practiced how to develop one on my second paper. Also, one challenge I faced was finding evidence and how to reach the word count needed for this assignment. It was challenging but I successfully reached my goal of completing it and I took my feedback seriously. 

With all the hard work put in this class, I’ve learned more about how to better my writing and also developed some new strategies, like adding good transition words and making my analysis strong in a way that I wouldn’t be so repetitive.

Below is a link to my papers.

https://azizn1015.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=page

Thank You!!!