This is the second draft of my introduction essay. Most of the changes are based on Anqi's advice and the powerpoint of the main points and requirements of our introduction essay. After this draft, I keep revising it with the advice Professor Murphy gives back. Basically, I show more quotations and evidence to support my ideas. I make the transtions between paragraphs more fluent and include more details about my ideas. You can see my improvements in the purface of this ePortfolio, my final introduction essay.

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

The assignments I like most are RIP project and the companion essay, which 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 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 means the things the soldiers real carried: weapons, food and their personal stuffs. But it also 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 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 during 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. Yellin proved Jacobs’ experience in Legacy Profile, 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 show all the evidence. So I choose to combine the first person narrative and documentary together. (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. 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. Imagine myself as a reader, I think the project is interesting enough for me to go on reading.

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 first use this method in Writing 39A when the professor ask us to write a short story. I also attach this short story in my portfolio after the RIP project.

Writing the companion essay is more interesting than writing the RA essay since I am now the audience of my own work. I change 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, which I think is fascinating, as the old saying goes, “A straw shows which way the wind blows”), 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 for me. Thanks to my professor and all my classmates.