This self-assessment will address what it took to get through the course and improve upon my writing skills through this course. Writing was something that had always been in my interest, however it always depended on the topic that I had to write about. The topic of psychoanalysis was something that I had never even heard of, so it was a coin flip on whether I would enjoy to write in the class, or absolutely despise it.

First Day of Class

The first day of my college experience was one in where I was unaware of my surroundings and didn’t know all much about college life whatsoever. Our first assignment was one in where we would look at an image and write about our feelings on the topic of the subject. The pictures were of Ruby Bridges and Betsy DeVos. I immediately began to write down my thoughts and wondered how significant the two pictures would be in the lecture ahead. As I wrote down my thoughts, I would become very critical of the picture with Betsy DeVos due to me knowing a little bit of background on her, and me disagreeing with certain decisions she has made in the past. My arguments on this first day would later be transferred to the literary narative paper later in the semester.

Reflections

Before giving in the assignments, we were to give in our thoughts and input on what we had thought about the assignment, and what our thought process was as we wrote the assignment. The reflections allowed for an easy way to look back on an assignment and to see where struggle were in certain topics in certain essays. They were easy to write every time due to the fact that it was opinion based, and that it was something that was very natural to write as opposed to most papers which required proper planning in order to even get started.

Literacy Narrative

In the Literacy Narrative, I chose to be in the position to be speaking about how Betsy Devos’ illustration was one that did not deserve to copy the likeness of Ruby Bridges. I had already chosen my stance as a result of the very first exercise we did in our first class of the semester. I already had a personal reason to dislike Betsy DeVos, and being in a position to write about why she isn’t in the right for trying to play innocent was a very convenient option for me for my first essay. I received feedback from my peers and from my professor in order to reach the final draft, as well as being taught how to write a reflection. It was a fairly straightforward essay that allowed me to get accustomed to a more sophisticated type of writing, as well as adjusting to college life.

Exploratory Essay

Continuing mid-way into the semester, we would receive one more essay assignment, this being the exploratory essay. For this essay, we were required to use a Freudian text (Freud’s Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis or On Dreams) in order to connect it with a few other stories of our choosing. I wasn’t fully aware of what I wanted to write about at first, and had some struggle finding out what I would even want to write about, until I read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat.” This short story was one that at first disturbed me with how bizarre and gruesome some of the scenes were. However, as I focused more and more, it became clear that I could use this story in order to write about the narrator’s suppression of emotions, as well as his deteriorating psyche as the story continued onward.

Annotated Bibliography

As I wrote these essays in the class, we would be required to find evidence to support our arguments and to show that we’re able to properly cite and use sources. A large majority of the sources came from PDFs online or from news articles that used images. The literacy narrative mainly used pictures in order to support my point, as well as a few other articles to support my claims. Not only this, but Freudian texts would be used to relate to other short stories for the exploratory essay.

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