Kamel Williams 

Self Reflection Essay

Of the three major essays that we have done in this class, I feel like the essay that truly helped me achieve the objectives set by this class is the second essay we completed. This was by far the most dense essay I have written during and prior to this class. My essay focused on the attitudes of the  French public towards the second generation Maghrebean population of France and specifically on how they are marginalized due to their cultural differences. 

This essay focused on how society sets a standard of how they believe things should be and if one is not in accordance with said guidelines, they do not make the cut. They are seen as foreign because their predominant religion isn’t the French Christianity which one thinks of when they think of France. The language they grew up hearing from their parents, Arabic, was not synonymous with the French culture and was believed to make them too foreign to be French despite having been born there. I feel like this essay’s main thesis helped with the achievement of the first outcome which as it states, helped me to  “recognize the role of language attitudes and standards in empowering, oppressing, and hierarchizing languages and their users.”  It showed how two sides of the objective actually. The sources uses by me showed how some spoke their Arabic and embraced their differences in an empowering way like the majority of people we had Seen in Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France. One other source shows how oppressive the forcing of French can be when pushed on these second generation Maghrebeans that can sometimes push them to forsake their native and cultural language in an effort to assimilate and adhere to the unwritten rules of French citizenship. 

I feel like a very important step in writing this essay was the feedback I had received from my peers and professor alike. Two of the objectives  in our syllabus had called for us  “explore and analyze in their own and other’s writing a variety of genres and rhetorical situations” and to” develop strategies for reading, drafting, revising, and editing” was exercised during our peer feedback. We read each other’s work with a very critical eye and provided constructive criticism on each other’s work. We would then do as another objective states,” develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes” when we incorporate the recommendations made by our peers and our professor in the final version of our essays.

CUNY’s One Search on the City College database was instrumental in my attempt to “locate research sources (including academic journal articles, magazine and newspaper articles) in the library’s databases/archives and on the internet and evaluate them for credibility, accuracy, and bias.” After a detailed explanation from our professor and a quick to the City College Library pre quarantine era, I learned how to find sources for my exploratory essay. I was able to find the adequate amount of peer reviewed articles that had been required for the essay. I would then try to find outside sources and bearing in mind what constitutes a source, I made an attempt to do as the final objected listen in the syllabus states, “understand  and use print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences.”

While writing my exploratory essay and other essays for other classes after that, I began utilizing the proper form of citation required for an essay of that sort. I was able to “practice systematic application of citation conventions” after reading the Norton’s Field guide provided by my instructor. I was able to prepare a work cited page as well as provide in ext citation for the document.