As someone who came to the United States a few years ago, I have always struggled with everything related to the English language, especially writing. This course was heavily focused on writing and reading, which was a nightmare for me. However, the course also gave me the opportunity to delve into many social issues, analyze and critique them methodically, and allowed me to discover the joy of exploring different and distinctive writing styles, beginning with the Transcultural Interview Essay and Commentary assignment.  

I was used to reading articles and books and then critiquing them, but here I had to interview someone and lead the conversation myself, without expressing any opinion, as if I were a journalist. 

It was difficult to listen to my interview partner without sharing my opinions, but somehow I managed to overcome my talkative nature and give my interviewee complete space to express themselves.  

Our conversation was enriching, as we discussed socially sensitive topics objectively, and my perspective on the interview subject changed completely. 

This assignment taught me how to be a good listener and how to analyze the speaker’s discourse. But the hardest part of this assignment was staying neutral during the critique, and not showing bias or getting emotional when discussing a controversial point. 

The second different writing style I learned in this course was through the Field Observation Assignment. 

 Like others of my generation, I use social media daily for hours, yet I had never thought about analyzing an online community in terms of participants’ interactions, behaviors, and reactions without participating myself.  

What helped me most with this assignment were the notes I took while observing this community; they served as a guideline for me, and I organized my article according to the information and observations I recorded.  

This assignment was the most enjoyable for me, as it combined a routine activity I do daily (browsing) with an academic assignment and an article I needed to submit. 

In this course, I gave and received feedback through class discussions, where we analyzed our peers’ work and used their help to modify our own. My colleagues’ comments were enriching and helpful, assisting me in refining my drafts and improving them until I was ready to submit them to the professor, who in turn evaluated my work and guided me. 

The course allowed me to precisely define my writing goals and choose topics that were neither too broad (causing information overload) nor too narrow (causing information scarcity). It also refined my reading, writing, reviewing, editing, and critiquing skills through my articles. 

The freedom to choose topics in this course gave me the opportunity to research and discuss a subject that has always occupied my mind and sparked my interest. Unlike other courses that template or limit research topics under one category, this course gave me the freedom to choose a topic that is rarely discussed– Antinatalism.  

Antinatalism was the subject of my literature review—and I somewhat regretted choosing it. Despite my interest in it as I mentioned, there is little information about it, and the same researchers’ names were repeated in my article, which might make it less credible because each researcher has a specific pattern in dealing with the subject. My repetition of certain researchers’ ideas and arguments made my review lean toward one opinion over another, although this was not my original intention. 

Nevertheless, this review deepened my understanding of the antinatalist perspective. After previously seeing their arguments as illogical and pessimistic, I became more understanding of their arguments and reasoning. This was a valuable outcome that I was happy to gain from this assignment. 

Besides all this, this course gave me the ability to express my opinion and critique social topics that are usually only discussed by specialists. The classroom environment was encouraging and interactive, which helped me gain confidence in offering my own comments and analyses. My professor was receptive to what was said with an open mind, but never missed an opportunity to guide us to become better students.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​