As a post-baccalaureate student, I found it challenging at first when it came to the writing portions. Being that the course is heavily based on writing, as also mentioned in the course name, I knew it was inevitable. I graduated with my Bachelor’s in the spring of 2020 and have not taken any literature or writing courses since then. With this nearly five year gap, I had quite the rocky transition back to writing academic papers. After the Rhetorical Analysis project, I felt that I found some sort of rhythm and regained some muscle memory with writing essays again. Reading more articles and other student essays also assisted with the process.

Being that I have written numerous essays in the past, both in high school and undergraduate studies, I was no stranger to the process. I was very familiar with writing papers based on analysis and reviews of various topics, so I was familiar with the structure coming into it. When it came to rhetoric, I was comfortable with the assignment. It was also very helpful that we went over examples of various rhetorical material in the class, such as political articles, advertisements, personal anecdotes, etc. Having a reference assisted to provide me with a layout on how to proceed. My goal was similar to what the goals in those references had been, which was to essentially inform and convince an audience.

The next project I had completely afterwards was the Literature Review. This particular project I had to navigate how to write an academic paper with two other students. My primary worry in the beginning was maintaining the same voice throughout the paper. The group decided to write about maternal healthcare, divided into sections about abortion, racial disparities, laws and regulations about maternity, and socioeconomic factors that help to tie all this is in together. My main focus was to write about the socioeconomic factors. I made this decision on my own since I felt more comfortable including numerical data and statistics to further the group’s literature review subject.

With the literature review came the group project. The group project was entirely based on the literature review, but we were given the option to create a children’s story or website based on what we had written about. Our group decided opted for a website. I had zero experience creating websites so I had some difficulty with even finding a platform to create one. Luckily, Lorelai created a Wix page and began the outline for the project. I feel that each of the members, including myself, did our assigned roles well, with someone going above and beyond and providing extra content to highlight our project’s theme on maternal healthcare. In the end, I am confident that we achieved in creating something that informed the audience on our mission, as also clearly stated on the opening page, about the importance of maternal healthcare and having access to resources that can provide with any healthcare-related assistance.

Our final project was to create a group presentation tying everything together. We assembled everything into a PowerPoint and each of us made slides containing what we had done on the website. This final group project very much forced us to find new collaborative ways to do group work, this time in front of an actual audience. During the live presentation, we were able to explain each of our slides, while interjecting every now and then to add on to each other’s points, which was very helpful for us collectively.

In the end, I found the class to be very helpful as an introductory writing course to college-level writing. Having the skills to write rhetorically in persuasive essays in order to inform and reach an audience can definitely provide the tools to continue writing academic essays as such in future courses. Being able to locate and use published peer-reviewed reports and articles is essential as all research papers require various references and citations.