This is the original draft of my introducation essay. After peer review with Anqi Xu, I give it a title, change the first paragragh to make it more attractive and conclusive. I show more work of mine and make my points more clear. You can see my improvements in the next draft.

In the weeks before midterm, I met problems about summarizing the materials too much; claims are not clear enough; transitions of points are not fluent enough. I kept working on these problems in the following weeks.

The RIP project and the companion essay are quite interesting work since 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.

I first choose to write about an incident in my life as autobiography for my RIP Project. I then changed the mind when the professor told us the project should be meaningful and attractive enough. 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 means the things the soldiers real carried: weapons, food and their personal stuffs. But it means the pressure and pain they carried spiritually. 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 learnt that avoiding the topic wouldn’t make the problem disappear. Jacobs could keep silence about her experience, but instead, she wrote it as a book 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 during the Vietnam War. But after talking with Professor Murphy in her office hour, I changed my mind. I am not good at writing documentary, so I choose to combine the first person narrative and documentary together. I also changed 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. That’s the reason these Vietnam veterans carry more pressure and pain than other veterans. That’s 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 veteran’s 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.

I also decided to use the method of changing POV in my project since I always think every person has different opinions, so everyone’s opinion is not complete. I want to show my audience the whole story.

Writing the companion essay was more interesting than writing the RA essay since I became the audience of my own work. I changed lots of part in my project because they were hard to analyze. I 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), 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 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 for me. Thank you to my professor and all my classmates.