Reflection Introduction
To begin with, I want to say that no one knew how excited I was when I knew the theme of my Writing 39C class is "How to talk about Video Games." I promise it was the best moment of my UCI time. It cannot be better when you knew you will take a game-related writing class. I feel I am extremely lucky because I took my most wanted topic to finish my UCI writing 39 series.
I am a Gamer. I really enjoyed every time we talked about video games in the class, which is what I am interested in and passion for. I still remembered we talked about video games addiction, women rights in video games, violence in video games and so on in class. I was so familiar with all of these topics but I knew I will choose eSports for sure because as a eSports worker, I had a bunch of words to express. This topic really gave me a lot of inspirations in the composition, which made me very glad to attend the class every time. With your earnestly teaching, I have learn how to do researches, how to find credible sources and how to make my own analysis and arguments. Doing the researches for the topic I am extremely familiar with was easy because I had a lot of ideas, information and knowledge about eSports beforehand. I was always thinking that I knew this industry deeply. However, it also caused a serious problems--I only picked up the information I want not I need. For example, in the first draft of my HCP, for most of the points I illustrated, I always gave the arguments first, which were my opinions and ideas, then I looked for the correlated sources. This way is convenient and easy for me, however, in a way I lost the original intention of doing a research paper---doing researches then transferring and combing the result of researches to arguments. From this point, I knew writing a research paper was not that easy even though I knew this topic. Instead of just describing my own ideas and opinions, the purpose of taking Writing 39C is learning how to do researches and then making neutral and indifferent arguments. When we write a research paper, we should use attempt to use the outside sources to give the evidence to support our own ideas. In order to make article clearer so that readers can get information and understand the purpose of our research papers quickly, we should use some charts or pictures to explain. Through writing and editing the drafts of HCP and AP, I realized it is also very important to choose appropriate pictures. Last but not least, learning how to paraphrase is also a very important and useful skill I got during the process of editing drafts of HCP and AP.
Words cannot express how appreciate I am after finishing this class-- not only for the reason I love this topic so hard, but also I made a big progress of becoming a good researcher and an academic writer.
Reflection on HCP
In HCP project, we need to choose a topic then discuss the history and problem of it. I chose eSports without doubt. I had a clear idea that eSports is a potential and huge growing industry right now, but behind its prosperous, it does have a bunch of problems. Between discussing the bubble of eSports industry and hard situation of eSports athletes, I chose the second one. So my argument is eSports athletes facing a much higher risk of burn-out and short career spans because of the lack of physical restrains on the amount an eSports athlete can practice and the constant changing of gameplay by game developers. I made several big problems in my first draft. One of them was what I mentioned in the Reflection introduction--ideas first then researches. During our conference, you kept pointing out to me that I need more evidences and explanations to support the arguments. For example, when I comparing the length of gaming season between eSports and traditional sports, I just stated my own knowledge about eSports. I wrote:" On top of a much more demanding daily and weekly schedule, eSports athletes do not get very much off-time-- the off season for eSports is extremely short, ...." It is obviously that I did not find sources to prove that. Even I did not mention anything about traditional sports. However, the purpose of my HCP paper is to show my readers about the comparation between eSports athletes and traditional sports athletes. Therefore, I followed your suggestions in my final draft-- I added a bunch of new elements about this point. I wrote:" eSports athletes do not get very much off time - the off season for eSports is extremely short, and there are always 3rd party tournaments called “Majors” hosted that players are pushed into playing in order to gain more exposure as well as earn more tournament money. For example, League of Legends spring season starts at the middle of January and end at the end of April. Two weeks later, the postseason season starts.....Therefore, comparing with traditional sports, which usually have offseason, the professional eSports player rarely get time to take a rest." I described the long season for eSports athletes with clear details and also made comparation with traditional sports athletes. Also, same things happened when I talked about eSports player's hard situation in their social lives. Since I had the sense that eSports athletes do not have break time, which is hard for them to enjoy their rest time with family and friends, I just wrote my own suspect about eSports athlete's social life:"eSports athletes have almost no break time or off-season to spend with a significant other, whereas on average X% of traditional athletes are either in a relationship, or even engaged/married." From the first draft, it is obvious to see that sometimes i just used my imagination to finish the HCP project. After talking with you, I did a lot of researches about this and finally used the example of a famous eSports athlete "Doublelife" to support this point. Switching from "idea first" to "research first" is the biggest progress I made in this class. I understood that I need evidences to support the arguments and explanation to support the researches I did.
The second point you kept noticing me is I need to add some appropriate elements such as images, charts, videos...I added images of staples center, a famous soccer player, and a famous eSports player. However, in your comment for the HCP final, you put:"And while I think your first multimodal image of the Staples Center is a good choice, your others don't really provide us with any added information or detail." I realized it is important to choose the appropriate multimodal elements, instead of just plugging random pictures in. Therefore, for the AP project, I think i did a good job because I inserted some decent pictures, which can prove and support the arguments, and give more details and evidence to readers.
Reflection on AP
I encountered the problem that many people will have in AP first draft--too much illustration of problems and small amount of description of solutions. In my first, I used almost 3/4 of length to talked about what is eSports, the history of eSports and the hard situation of players. For solutions, which are the most important of an AP project, I just wrote three short paragraphs to discuss. So for the final draft, I tried to intend to use more piece to talk about different solutions and evaluate them. And I did more researches about specific examples of eSports athletes. For example, I added the information about WESA which is a eSports council.I did make some changes but it still far away from enough because in the comment of AP final, you wrote: "in many ways it seems like the solution is already in place, and in the case of scholarships, it is not always clear how these gifts of money will help prevent the injurious lifestyle you identify in the first part of the paper." This comment is extremely to the point. When I read it, I realized what I need to improve. This problem is also what I were looking for but had not found it yet--my solutions cannot solve the problems I described. This is a big problem. Even though solutions are right and they are already in place, they cannot solve the problems of eSports athletes' injurious professional career. I need to do more deeper researches to find solutions to solve the problem I illustrate.
Last but not least, both of my HCP and AP project have some grammar mistakes and incorrect MLA format for the word cited page. These problems looked small but important. In the Self-Assessment, I mentioned that my weakest in writing is grammar and sentence structure. I think I improve a little bit in this aspect. However, I still need to take care about this point seriously. As an academic writer, I have to avoid these problems in the future--to make my paper more credible.