Cover Letter
During this phase where we are assigned to do a researched essay. In this phase, I assimilate research sources in the library’s databases or archives and on the Internet and evaluate them for credibility, accuracy, timeliness, and bias. This was my least favorite essay to do. Personally, I do not like to come up with my own topic and do research on it. One can see that I lack to compose texts that integrate my instance with appropriate sources using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation.
Nonetheless, the information, practice worksheet, and formatting provided by the professor was helpful to aid me on my essays. Finding the right sources that can help with my researched essay was very difficult and took me a long time as well. Exploring through the CCNY library for my topic was relatively uneasy since most of them I found were books. After I found some, I decided to go in google to find the remaining amount of sources.
When I started writing my introductory paragraph, I was stuck with what I should do with my topic of language diversity and education. I wasn’t sure at all where I’m going with this. But later on, when I was doing the synthesis and rhetorical precis, I had decided what I wanted to go with for my topic. Although rhetorical precis was simple because of the provided template and the sources I already have, synthesis was a lot more difficult than I anticipated. The synthesis required me to do more critical thinking and take my stances on the sources I picked for my topic. After the synthesis, it was time for my very first draft of the researched essay.
I didn’t know how the researched essay should be formatted like but I decided to go with the introduction, then summary of the sources, then the sources’ elaboration and my stance that supports my thesis, and finally the thesis. I just decided to mash the introductory paragraph, the rhetorical precis, and synthesis together in order to create this researched essay. Though I didn’t know how to complete this researched essay, the time and worksheet helped me slowly build this piece of essay and learned lots of things along the way.
