Welcome to CUNY Academic Commons.

Im Bella Rivera, and through the eight-course learning outcomes, I learned to engage in the collaborative and social aspects of the writing process. I worked on three essays this semester, a personal essay, an argumentative essay, and a literary comparative essay. Jumping into my Essay “My Four Way Relationship”, I wrote about the type of relationship I have with my Grandparents in connection to how religion played a major role in this relationship. Using sensory details throughout the essay, I gave readers an opportunity to in a sense be in my shoes. With the subject matter of what I was writing about for this paper, I didn’t need to go back to a family member like others did for this assignment. I was able to speak from my experiences and feelings about what I had gone through. With this assignment, I got feedback not only from my professor, but peer review was first introduced with this essay. This was the first and not the last time we used peer review for our assignments throughout the semester, which overall helped me submit the final papers shown throughout this site. Moving on to my argumentative essay “Lack of Religion, a dealbreaker?” With this paper I argued that in the short story “What Must I Say to You”, Norma Rosen uses the ideas around religion, and the main character’s lack of knowledge of her religion from her upbringing to separate/ isolate her from her husband. With this paper, I had to go in with a different headspace from the first paper, since now I wasn’t talking about myself anymore. The process of writing this paper was different in a way now I was looking for evidence from a text and not my personal life. The things that stayed the same from the first paper were again the peer review and the feedback coming from my professors. This paper gave me the ability to tap into argumentative writing in this class Adding on I was also able to use strategies such as critical analysis, interpretation, and synthesis. For my final paper it was a comparative argumentative essay among two texts we covered between the two FIQWS classes this semester. For the final paper, I argued that different levels of commitment to faith/religion cause inequalities and tension within relationships that are connected with faith. Overall, with the work done in and out of class, including and excluding these three papers I’ve shared, it is clear that the FIQWS class of Jewish American Studies has taught me the eight-course learning outcomes,