Alishan Jamshid

April 10th, 2021

Professor Furlong

Essay #2 Reflection

The genre of Essay 2 was interview. This essay was based on an interview I did with a peer/ classmate. The interview consisted of me interviewing a classmate named Miriam and asking her ten questions ranging from simple closed ended questions to more personal open ended questions. I started the interview off by asking her simple and generic questions like “what are your biggest pet peeves?” so we could get comfortable with each other and I could ask her more interesting and open ended questions that were more personal. The purpose of the interview was to get to know Miriam better while paying attention to her body language throughout the interview. Another part of the purpose was also to find out a subculture my partner belonged to. I accomplished this by slowly asking more open ended and personal questions which allowed Miriam to slowly get comfortable with me and give better answers to my questions. The potential audience for this essay could be the english department staff at City college. Another potential audience could be my classmates that I peer edited with and also my professor who will grade it. The relationship of me as a writer and my potential audience is professional. It is a student to teacher/ classmate relationship and my medium that i’m using to communicate is a class assignment. The knowledge that I share with my potential audience is the assignment sheet. We are all mutually aware of this assignment and are doing it in class as a group. The goal that we share is passing this class and acquiring the credits linked to it. Peer reviews and other feedback played a big part in aiding me in my tasks. Peer reviews and feedback gives you other sets of eyes on your assignment that have a different perspective so they can notice something that you might not notice. My overall reaction to this assignment is positive. I really enjoyed doing this particular assignment because it is a lot different than any essay I have had to do in the past. It was interesting to interact with a peer for an assignment and have to use their answers for my essay. One aspect of the revision process that I found challenging was choosing which questions and answers I talked about in my essay. I didn’t want to just list all the questions, I wanted to choose a few out of the ten and go more in detail on those. All of the answers to the questions were interesting and that made it harder to pick and choose. I resolved that issue by choosing a few questions that I asked Miriam earlier on that were closed ended and a few that I asked towards the second half of the interview that were more open ended. The in-class interviews, homework readings and assignments, and class discussions impacted my final product because they helped me improve my essay. For example the truck stop reading gave me new insight on how to interview and note take.