My full name is Amina Jamal Anshasi. My first name, Amina, was given to me by my mom who named me after her mom (my grandma). It is also an Islamic name meaning “trustworthy” or “honest.” My middle name is my dad’s first name. In Arab culture, children’s middle names are always their dad’s first name. So, technically, my middle name could go on and on if I listed all dad, his dad, his dad’s dad, etc. My last name comes from my dad, of course. I’m not sure what it means but it’s Palestinian. When I was younger, my dad used to joke that it meant “pear” because in Arabic, pear is anjaz (similar to Anshasi). While I still don’t know the history of my last name, I do definitively know that it’s so rare that anyone with my last name is related to me. Just a couple months ago, I met my second cousin through TikTok because we both had the same last name in our usernames. We started chatting to figure out how we were related since our last name is so uncommon.

Growing up, I was always embarrassed by my middle name because it is a man’s name. Whenever asked to share my middle name, I would always add the fact that it was customary for my middle name to be my dad’s name so that it would make sense to people. Now, however, I appreciate my name because of how heavily rooted it is to my heritage. It’s very common for people to be named after a grandparent in my culture (hence my first name), have their dad’s first name as their middle name, and have their father’s family name as their last name. While I can appreciate the history behind my name, it is frustrating how often my name is also spelled incorrectly or mispronounced. I have many certificates and letters/emails with my name spelled wrong.

I grew up speaking Arabic at home. If you know anything about Arabic, you know that every country has it’s own dialect. This means that an Egyptian Arab might have difficulty understanding an Iraqi Arab. I grew up primarily speaking the Moroccan dialect with my mom. My dad is Palestinian, but because of his life as a refugee, he lived in many different Arabic-speaking countries (Kuwait, Egypt, Libya, Jordan). Therefore, his Arabic isn’t purely the Palestinian dialect, but a conglomerate of all the dialects he grew up speaking. Because of this, I am often mocked for not being fluent in Palestinian Arabic but I am also mocked by Moroccans for not being fully Moroccan. In an English-speaking setting, I often forget words in English but remember them in Arabic for a quick moment. I’ve never been mocked for this but I do find it interesting from a cultural-linguistic perspective how growing up speaking two languages at home can affect one’s psychological processes.

I read Yuka’s discussion post and I think they did a really great job following the guidelines. Yuka mentioned the title of the reading, the authors, and the main point of the excerpt in the first two sentences. Yuka’s summary of the reading is very clear and concise and defines all of the key terms from the reading.

In her second paragraph, Yuka found arguments of definition to be most intriguing and brings up the example of politicians with sexual assault claims. She says that when these people have claims brought against them, they focus a lot on their personality and history rather than the facts of the accusation itself. This idea was similar to my own discussion post about forensic arguments because I, too, was fascinated by the concept of ignoring the facts of a situation and instead argue about a person’s character to manipulate the situation. From this post, I learned about the similarities between definition and forensic arguments, since they both involve arguing about the past.

Hi everyone! My name is Amina Anshasi and I go by she/her pronouns. I’m a first-year and I plan on majoring in psychology and minoring in criminal justice. I’m from San Mateo, CA (a 30-40 minute drive south of SF) and I’m commuting from home. Some things I like to do in my free time are play soccer, watch crime shows and sitcoms, go shopping with friends, listen to music, and play with my two pet birds. I also love learning new languages; I’m Arab so I grew up speaking Arabic, but I also speak Spanish and French. I love making friends so I’m very excited to get to know you all!

 

In the past, I’ve mainly done analytical writing for classes like English and History. I enjoy reading analyzing ideas and pieces of writing because it gives me the liberty to draw my own conclusions and make contemporary comparisons. I’ve also done some creative writing for English class but significantly less than analytical writing. I enjoy having some structure to my writing assignments to help me started so, for that reason, I don’t really enjoy creative writing because it’s very open-ended.

 

From this course, I wish to continue to work on my analytical skills and specifically learn how to be concise in my writing. I often feel as though to get my point across, I need to explain it over the course of many sentences which results in going over the word limit. I want to focus on how to keep my ideas clear but also short. I also want to learn how to best review my own essays after writing a first draft because I usually struggle edit my papers. I want to contribute to class by uplifting the ideas of others and also building off of my peer’s comments to create a collaborative work environment. I find that I do my best work when I have to opportunity to bounce my ideas off of others and hear their thoughts as well so I look forward to doing that in this class.