Yazeed Almodayan 343777
Carl Smeller
December 4th 2013
Final Reflective Memo
Biographic details:
My name is Yazeed Mohammed and I am currently 27 years of age. My status within the
university and within the country of the United States is that of an international student. I came to the
United States in order to pursue my higher education in the year 2010. Ever since then, I have had the
opportunity to learn a lot from my peers at the English school and Texas Wesleyan University as well
as from my respected teachers and instructors. As I am an international student, there were certain
language barriers for me when I first came to the United States. I was unable to speak fluently in the
English language or write in this language.
Being an Arab by origin and having lived there for the greater part of my life, there were a lot of
cultural, societal as well as linguistic differences which I encountered. Some of these were difficult tot
tackle but most of them were easy to adapt to. The most important learning I have had after taking this
course is improving my language as well as my writing skills in the English language. By taking this
and other such courses in my academic life and having the support of my peers and my instructors, I
have come to cross the language as well as the cultural barriers and I have learn that to live in harmony
with differences in society is not difficult at all. Rather, it is a very much enriching experience, which
has given me lifelong valuable lessons.
Course Outcomes:
During the tenure of this course, there are a wide variety of outcomes that I feel I need to
discuss in this memo because they have contributed a great deal to my writing experience as a writer in
English language. I have been able to understand how genres shape reading and writing, how to
integrate my own ideas with ideas used from secondary research and other sources, how to cite
accurately and appropriately the evidence form outside sources in a well established documentation
style and the ability to control the surface features in writing such as syntax, grammar, punctuation and
spelling. With reference to these outcomes, I will be using the example of my recent writing that I have
written of this course regarding which is “coaching a soccer team as a career choice”. With regards to
understanding of the different genres, I have been able to understand the difference between an
argument and persuasive essay, between an informative essay, a report and a research paper and an
evaluation paper. For example, in my latest writing of becoming a soccer coach as a career choice, the
genre I was allotted to write on was an evaluation essay and I was able to relate to all the evaluations
that have to be done prior to making the career choice in the mentioned field of soccer. Also, the
learning outcome of trying to integrate my own ideas with the ideas of others, I have used secondary
research in my evaluation essay and have tried to integrate the ideas of the various authors on choosing
to become a coach as a career choice with my own ideas of becoming a coach. Coming towards the
outcome of being able to cite sources in a well standard documentation style, I have been able to
demonstrate this skill very much effectively in the writings I have completed for this class. I have been
able to use citations of MLA and other formats and have been able o successfully use different citation
as well as in text citations styles or my writings. As is apparent from my recent evaluation essay on
soccer, I have correctly used the MLA style citation format in citing the secondary sources for my essay
and supporting viewpoints. Finally, grammar, spelling and punctuation are amongst the most important
elements in any writing pie e, and I have been able to learn a lot of English language and the
grammatical as well as punctuation rules while learning how to write in this course. As is apparent from
my recent evaluation essay, I have been able to ensure that there are minimum grammatical,
punctuation and spelling mistakes in my writing.
General Reflections:
The main interesting aspect of this course that I learned was the different writing styles in terms
of the genres and how to write for a given genre. This course more or less provided me with everything
that I set out to achieve and I am now able to write complete essays as well as reports without
assistance from the instructor or my fellow peers. My aim before the start f this class was to be able to
write on my own and master the skill of using different genres and I have achieved that. I feel that my
writing has improved dramatically in this semester after taking this course. The main reason is because
of the fact that I have been able to get past my grammar and punctuation errors with the help of the
essay topics assigned to me. My favorite assignment of this semester was the evaluation essay I wrote
on becoming a soccer coach as a career choice in the future. I really enjoyed writing and researching
about his because soccer is my favorite sports and it is only the national sports of Saudi Arabia and
thus, my interest in it has been from childhood. Therefore, I enjoyed researching on the prospects of
becoming a coach for these sports in the United States.
As far as writing in electronic environments is concerned, I feel that this contributed a lot to my
learning of technology and its uses in academic writing and work. This is because it is the age of
technology and learning how to use technology such as Microsoft word for writing and using its
features for adding comments and reviewing the work of peers have been very helpful tools for
efficient writing. As a writing student, the most important source of feedback for me has been the
comments which are placed in the margins o the paper and tell me or instruct me on how to make
certain points better, how to explain them better and what sort of errors are contained in them. As a
writing student, it is not only important to look at the grade at the end, but for me, the most important
point was to read the comments you gave me on the margins and be able to make a much clearer and
more standardized draft based on those comments. The only other thing I would like to address here is
that in addition to learn how to write I have also learn the use of technology which has been a very
major source of learning for me and I am sure that it will help me greatly in my professional life as
well.