Transferring What I Know

This is my last low division writing class in UCI. Since I did not pass the previous 39C class, which focused on "The New Jim Crow", I have made a great determination to retake this class and pass it. The problem I had in previous 39C class is the scope of the problem I chose was too broad which made my essay too conceptual and not specific. Here is my previous title of Historical Conversation Project "Federal Government’s Failure to Take Effective Measures to Eliminate Housing Discrimination of African Americans in United States". Professor suggested me to focus on one specific location and narrow down my problem as much as possible but I did not do that which made my essay less persuasive. Federal's failure and its influence on African American were too big and I can’t fully present it to audience in a only 2000 word essay. I must avoid choosing a broad topic. And this quarter I chose charter school, which is a new form of school system, and I only focus on its ineffectiveness from finance, academic and transparency. It is really a long way to go and it is a little bit shameful for me since most international students like me have already passed low division writing classes. But I thought I could do this as well as long as I transferred what I learned previously and keep up with the writing strategies professor gives on class. According to all the writing courses I took including 39C, I have improved in my skill as a writer. In the beginning, my essay structure was almost 4 or 5 paragraphs including introduction, three main paragraphs and conclusion. After taking these courses, I begin to try to think about best way of organize my essay including transitional paragraph or sentences and separate by different section. And I could even do multimodal, pictures and tables for instance, as long as it fits my purpose. However, I must follow MLA form. The most important change in my writing is that I know when I make an argument and when should I make analysis to back it up with evidence and credible resources. This course Writing 39C is much more different than previous writing classes I have taken. 39A and 39B are more of learning to composite by reading others' stories and rhetoric decision and finally create my own stories based on my rhetoric choice. However, 39C requires me to do a lot of research and at the same time, I have to digest it in order to clearly frame the problem and its solution. I learned strategies to find resources through special training by two good school librarians. And I know how to make sure the resource I find is credible by searching who the author is, what level of resource it is and where the resources from by Google search. Secondly, the peer revision is much more frequently than all the writing courses I have taken before. I don’t like peer reviews because sometimes I think peers do not really take my paper seriously. But in this quarter, I really appreciate my group member because I actually learned a lot from peer advices. They gave me good advices on my paper as well as transferring their knowledge of their research progress. Because we all divided by same topic, we all learned at least some from others. Writing 39 series definitely helped me succeed in other courses. I remember I took two historian courses, Asian American 50 and History 40A. What I learned, for example how to make a synthesis statement and how to use historic events to prove my argument have helped to passed those courses. Now, I feel more confident to take any challenging writing courses in the future.

Composing Progress and Revision

My first essay is Historical Conversation. Before composing the essay, we were given many articles and mainly the core textbook “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” to read. Based on the historic context Diane Ravitch frame in his book and present articles debated about various topics in his book. I finally chose to write about charter school expansion as a bad trend of American education, which is way better than my previous topic. I further researched charter expansion by reading recent newspaper such as New York Times and Education Week and also with the help of excellent librarians, by going to library website. Maybe because I put too much focus on the depressing news of charter expansion, my first draft of HCP is lack of scholarly resources and professor said, “You do have one academic sources, the last, but there is a heavy reliance on popular sourcing.” And I realized that I used too much citation from articles from newspapers. So I read two scholarly resources on the library website which enrich the persuasiveness of my essay. My peer gave me very good advices as well. Here is the endnote from my group members.

The red lines give me an important suggestion when I revised my HCP. It said that I did not have a firmly position in supporting charter schools or public schools. He made me rethink whether I agree with charter schools expansion. I actually did not say charter school expansion was totally bad thing but it was not efficient to improve students’ education based on its costs of driving students from traditional public schools. But one sentence on my essay may confuse my audience so I changed it to more related to the main idea of the availability of charter schools.

Also, he reminded me that at the end of citation, I must give my analysis of what the citation tells us. Here was what I add after such citation to integrate together. 

AP project asks me to pose solution to the problem I framed. The first draft of my AP was more about the causation of the problem and its background information. According to professor’s comment and my peers, I feel like I was doing worse job than HCP. But actually, I spent more time on AP than HCP project. All the comments together remind me that I actually provide too much excessive information, which confuses readers on what my thesis statement is. So, my main focus is on the first part of my problem introduction. Here is the difference between Final AP and first draft. I took 2 pages to frame the problem, which misleads readers. So I changed it to 1 and half page and clearly state what my problem is.       (Before)                                 (After)

Synthesis statement is also clear now.

Besides, I also improved my skill as a researcher. One trick I learned from training is that I could use endnotes in the resource I found already to locate another resource arguing the same topic. Since they are discussing the same topic, it saves me a lot of time. For example, I found “Charter, Private, Public Schools and Academic Achievement: New Evidence from NAEP Mathematics Data” by looking at endnote of the textbook. Additionally, searching by different type and searching by narrowing down the time line are also good to locate most desired resources. Finally, I used the EndNote to record my recourses, so when I need to read it, I can find it very fast. 

Last but not least, I improve in writing bibliography in MLA format on the Purdue Online Writing Lab. By looking over it, I made no mistakes on in-text citation, and work cited pages.

Rhetoric, Argumentation, & Multi-modal Communication

The problem of charter school expansion is hurting students especially minorities. In my HCP project, I wrongly put irrelevant pictures on it by showing the violence of traditional public school because charter schools are taking resources from them. This picture depicts a staff was knocked down by a student, but violence is another story of the topic which i did not send a lot of content on it. Compared with previous topic which mostly I used emotional pictures to show the bad housing condition for African Americans, in charter school expansion, I mostly I use statistics such as graphs and tables. One of the tables and one of the graphs are here. This table (see table 1)shows the huge increasing number of charter school in America and this graph (see figure 2) shows that most charter schools are high poverty and racial minorities and blacks are mostly likely in these schools.