In these weeks, I benefit a lot from the RIP project and companion essay, peer reviews, class materials and other cool experience. I learn the relationship between the author and the audience, the importance of genre. I also learn how to use different rhetoric in essays (my favorites are repetition and comparison) and show ethos in essays. I will show you’re my memorable journey by details.

The assignments I like most are RIP project and the companion essay, which are quite interesting works. We write a project, and then analyze it as the audience. This project helps me understand the relationship between the author and the audience: we are not writing for us, instead, we are writing for others to read. So the most essential part is not expressing our ideas, instead, it’s making the audience understand our points. That is the reason we need to choose the most suitable genre and rhetoric to express our ideas. I revise my project for many times and learn new things each time.

I first choose to write about an incident in my life as autobiography for my RIP Project. I then change the mind when the professor told us the project should be meaningful and attractive enough. I learn that the purpose of an essay is essential and it should be meaningful and intriguing enough in order to attract the audience to read it. I then choose the war as my topic. I read Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried years ago and it really shocked me. I liked this book mostly because of the title. It not only means the things the soldiers real carried: “the things they carried were largely determined by necessity” (The Things they carried, P11), but also means the pressure and pain they carried spiritually. The most impressing plot I remember is the change of Jimmy Cross. He is deep in love with a girl named Martha. He loves her so much and treasures her letters and photos: “he kept them (letters from Martha) folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack”, “the letters weighed 10 ounces”. He reads her letters and strokes her photos other and over again. But after witnessing his comrades’ deaths, he finally burns her photos. (The Things they carried, P11) He loses the ability of love because of the horrible war. As I say in my RIP project, “The young soldiers who attended the war were normal and passionate people. They have lovers, friends, and families. They have golden hearts, and dreams of being heroes of their countries. But they experienced death, lost their golden hearts, and their dreams broke.” I never thought about the war deeply since it was too far away from my life and it’s not a pleasant topic. But soon I learn that avoiding the topic wouldn’t make the problem disappear. Harriet Jacobs could keep silence about her experience, but instead, she wrote it as a book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, to tell the people who didn’t know much about slavery how horrible it was and tell the enslaved people they could live as free people.

My purpose was proving that Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried was based on his real experience in the Vietnam War. It’s already hard for a Vietnam veteran to decide to write about his real experience, but some people don’t even believe him. It’s also hard or Jacobs to write about her experience of being an enslaved woman. But many people didn’t believe the book was nonfiction and thought the author of it was a white woman. Yellin proved Jacobs’ experience in Legacy Profile (a reading material of my class, I put a link of this reading after work cited), I want to be Tim O’Brien’s Yellin. But after talking with Professor Murphy in her office hour, I changed my mind. It’s hard for documentary to be interesting since it mostly just shows all the evidence. So I choose to combine the first person narrative and documentary together. As I write in my project, “What is the worst part of the war? It is end, but it is never end.” I try to show my audience the everlasting pain the war brings and the lingering shadow of the veterans. This is inspired by Nothing but the Truth: a Documentary Novel, the primary source I find in the assignment “revised RIP proposal”. It’s both a documentary and modified epistolary style novel with diary entries, personal letters, school memos and transcripts of dialogue.

I also change my purpose. When I was looking for materials for my project, I found that since many Americans view the Vietnam War as a mistake, they view the Vietnam veterans as murderers instead of heroes. According to the Wikipedia, “the movement against the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War began in the U.S. with demonstrations in 1964 and grew in strength in later years. The U.S. became polarized between those who advocated continued involvement in Vietnam and those who wanted peace.” “By October, 1969, 58 percent of the Gallup respondents said the U.S. never should have gotten into the war in the first place.” (Protests Back Home) That is the reason these Vietnam veterans carry more pressure and pain than other veterans. That is also the most important reason Tim O’Brien wrote the book, which I view as writing cures——he wrote the book to cure the pain in the Vietnam veterans’ heart. So I finally decided that the purpose of my project is to show the pain and stress the Vietnam veterans carry and people’s lack of understanding. Imagine myself as a reader, I think the project is interesting enough for me to go on reading. The topic of the Vietnam War is meaningful enough and the changing of POV is very attractive.

I also decided to use the method of changing POV in my project. I always think every person has different opinions even about the same issue, so everyone’s opinion is not complete. I want to show my audience the whole story. I choose to write my project chapter by chapter, and in each chapter, I choose a different character to narrative his/her story——to show the Vietnam War in his/her eyes. I first use this method in Writing 39A when the professor asked us to write a short story. I also attach this short story in my portfolio after the RIP project.

After finishing my RIP project, writing the companion essay is also fascinating since I am now the audience of my own work. I change lots of part in my project because they were hard to analyze. For example, in the first chapter of my project, I use the character of a veteran’s mother. In the original project, I just wrote about her son’s nightmares and the desperate she has. But these feelings are abstract: it’s hard for the audience to be empathic. So I change the way to show their pain. I first talk about the physical pain her son has, then I write “but that’s just the tip of the iceberg of our problem”. Since most people have the experience of physical pain, I contrast the veteran’s physical pain and mental pain to make it more clear and empathic for my audience. I also add some description about the veteran’s appearance, which is also clearer to understand than just writing about his nightmares: “He is so pale and thin, like a crumpled paper.” “With sunken eyes, more grey hairs and stubbly beard in his unshaven chin, he looks much older, very haggard and tired.”

I also choose to analyze my project chapter by chapter to make it clearer. I analyze my usage of comparison, which I learned from Jacobs. She uses many simple word comparisons to show the huge difference between enslaved people and free people, which I think is fascinating, as the old saying goes, “A straw shows which way the wind blows”. For example, in chapter 3, she writes: The Slaves’ New Year’s Day: “O, you happy free women, contrast your New Year's day with that of the poor bond-woman!” She uses the most common words of “happy” and “poor”, “free” and “bond”, but we can feel the big contrast here. I also analyze my usage of repetition and changing of POV. I am quite satisfied with my final work though it’s not perfect, but I really put many efforts and time on it.

I think the most essential I learned from this class is to write as a reader. Since I always write unclearly and think the audience should understand my words, but they don’t. (I also understand it more specifically during the peer review, when my peer asks what I mean.) I learned to use rhetoric skills of comparison and repetition, writing as the audience, importance of genres and so many things I can even mention. This is really an amazing journey. Thanks to my professor and all my classmates.

Work Cited

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_United_States_involvement_in_the_Vietnam_War
2. http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe50s/life_09.html
3. O’Brien, T.,The Things They Carried, http://savanna.auhsd.us/view/26051.pdf

Not quoting but mentioning in the essay, Yellin’s Legacy Profile