Writing the Essay
In your essay, your job is threefold: (1) make a claim about the extent to which you have or haven’t met the course goals, (2) prove that claim by pointing to specific evidence from your work this semester, and (3) discuss the factors that contributed to and/or hindered your work towards meeting the course goals.

I suggest you organize your essays as follows. Begin with an introduction that establishes some context. For instance, you might mention your experience of writing before this course, or what you expected from this course, or maybe the importance of writing to professionals in the field you plan to enter. Introduce the course goals in your own language (as though I don’t know what they are). Then make a clear statement about how well you’ve met them (note: that’s your thesis statement for this essay).

Then, take each of the four goals individually, and spend a few paragraphs on each one discussing how you’ve met (or not met) them. You’ll need to back up what you say by doing one or more of the following:

• Quoting from your writing this semester, or from my comments on your writing
• Describing your writing process as you worked on any of the assignments in this class
• Speculating on what factors helped you to meet a particular goal, or what changes might have helped you be more successful

If you’ve been completing the extra-credit copywork assignment, you should also discuss how that work may have helped you meet the course goals. (And if you don’t think that it did, you can say that.)

Then, in the final paragraphs of your essay, put the pieces together. What does all this add up to? What’s next? Or, what’s missing: What aspects of your growth as a writer don’t come up when you focus on just these course goals?

As you write your essay, please keep these three crucial points in mind:

1. You must support your claims with specific, explicit references to your writing and writing process. If you just tell without showing, you won’t do well on this assignment.
2. You won’t get a better grade on this assignment just for saying you met all the goals fully, and you won’t get a lower grade for saying you’re not there yet. I’m interested in reading about your learning process, even (especially) if that process isn’t finished.
3. And related to the previous point: I am absolutely uninterested in reading what you think I want to read. Be sincere. If you do, this assignment can be a valuable chance to think critically about and improve your writing. If you don’t, this will be a huge waste of your time, right at the point of the semester when we’re all least interested in wasting our time.