Becoming A Writer: Development Over the Course

Writing 39 series has been the most difficult and amusing writing class I have ever attended. I had faced a lot of difficulties and pushed myself to improve in every assignment. The intense writing process lets me learn a lot in ten weeks which change my attitude and skills toward writing. When I first knew the theme of this course is fairy tales, I thoughts it would not be as hard as I imaged and I would be confident to receive a good grade. However, when I actually started writing, fairy tales do not make it easy for me to fit the requirements. I kept question about my writing and fix them over and over to achieve my standards. Over this course, I have learned a lot of writing skills and methods from the reading and lectures. My abilities in creating an arguable thesis, analyzing the text, using the rhetorical methods, and organizing the structure had greatly improved compare with my writing in 39A. Benefit from the RIP project, I had also changed my role from an analyzer to a writer, who can use various writing skills to persuade messages to the audience and create my own story.

When I received the first critical reading assignment, I had not changed my mode and unready for the first challenge. Instead of analyzing the significant differences of Little Red Riding Hood and Little Red Cap, I mainly described the distinct messages and setting of each tale, which the audience can understand by themselves. I basically talked about a bunch of unimportant sentences and ignore the meaningful detail. The comment from my instructor woke me up from casual attitude and being serious about how I am going to change. Learning from this lesson, I tried to develop my analysis skills by marking the important words and sentences in the texts while rereading them again and again. This good reading habit gives me a lot of inspiration when I wrote my RA paper and reduce my time on research. The best proof of my improvement is the in-depth analysis of each tale in my RA paper. Focusing on the rhetorical methods and word choices, I decide to select actual text in the tales which contain ambiguous meanings to show the implication of sexual injustice. Narrow down to concrete words and their diverse connotation let the audience rethink about the tale in other perspectives. Different than vague generalization in the critical reading exercise, the analysis in the final draft is more arguable and trustworthy. On the other hand, it motivates the audience to search for better comprehension and see the tale differently.  

My RA paper focuses on analyzing the social and cultural influence in fairy tales through different rhetorical methods and states the main purpose of fairy tales as to educate, warn and help people in various situations. Since Little Red Riding Hood and The Little Match Girl are two of my most familiar stories, I chose the Perrault’s version and compared it with Andersen’s tale. The first theme I had in my mind was to show the custom, culture, society, and government behind those fairy tales. These two stories were written in different periods of time and deliver distinct messages to their target audience. And those differences are based on the authors’ experience of the society which involves their own perspective. After the first draft, I realized that only talk about the influence did not build any connection with rhetorical analysis. In order to solve this problem, I inserted a list of rhetorical methods in the thesis statement and related them to the social and cultural influence. “These two tales persuade distinct messages to diverse groups of people based on their differences in the social and political environment by using the different rhetorical methods such as metaphor, intimation, side description and conditional contrast”. Showing the background influence through the usage of rhetorical methods combine most important elements in the essay and directly tell the audience what I am going to talk about. As my instructor pointed out, only explained the differences did not show the significance of these two tales. Why I chose these two instead of other? The conversation with my instructor provided me some suggestion and inspiration. Since I was talking about fairy tales, I thought it would be a good idea to reflect fairy tales as a whole and related it to the writing format and style. By stating that fairy tales are all created under good intentions to either educate, warn or help people in different situations, I included “Perrault adapted the older format of fairy tales and wrote in plain language with no ups and downs...And his audience, specifically those young, well-breaded girls, will be shocked by the serious consequences and keep in mind to be aware of men...Different than Perrault, Andersen inserted many details such as the comparison of living environment between the poor and the rich”. Different writing formats and styles clearly manifested the main purpose of fairy tales and determine the connection of these two tales.

The second major assignment is the RIP project and essay. Different than what I used to do in writing class, I had an opportunity to create my own story related to fairy tales and used the skills we had learned in this course. Inspired by the experience from writing the RA paper, I came up with an idea to represent the suffer and oppression of the poor in capitalist society. My first scheme was diary entries from working class man which record his daily experience and show how he is being oppressed by the boss and other. I do not have the habit of writing diaries and never able to consist even I had tried to record daily events before. This assignment recalls the interest of writing diaries and I thought it would be a different experience if I tried to comprehend the world in others eyes. However, this proposal did not include anything about fairy tales. I was uncertain about this idea and seek help from my instructor. He gave me some suggestion and I decided to include and reform characters from fairy tales as the author’s neighbor. This combination builds the connection between my own story and tales we read in class. In the first draft, I included characters from four tales and distributed one story into each entry. Different than I expected, the primary message became unclear because of the various information from each tale and my audience could not understand what I tried to persuade. According to the peer reviewers’ advice, I limited the tales and focus on transforming the tale The Little Match Girl and The Happy Prince. By doing so, the theme of showing the gap, differences, conflicts, and prejudice between wealthy and poor became obvious and understandable.  

After stating the theme, another big challenge I faced was how to include rhetorical methods in the diary entries and persuade the audience as I wanted. Analyzing the text was no longer a problem I had, but it did not mean that I was free and master in using those skills. Finding out the implication was easy but using them were totally different. In the first draft of my RIP project, there was no sense of rhetorical methods but plain language to state what happened. Without personal perspective and thoughts, the diaries were just like usual recording and lack of characteristic. On the other hand, the way I included conversation in the diaries made the entries even more like fiction story instead of personal writing. No tone and emotion were included which made the diaries sound tedious and simple. After rereading the original tales, I decided to do it backward and chose what methods I wanted to use and what effect I wanted to create. For each important scene, I determined the tone and emotion first then distributed different rhetorical methods to represent the scene. Stating the important words and phrases I should use writing helped me described in specific language and created vivid images. Also, I noted the main theme in my mind while writing which inspired me to came up with more description and ideas. In the final draft, I wrote “The snow dropped slowly and created a thin layer upon her curly blond hair...her cheek was red as an apple with a sweet smile on her exquisite face. The weak light on the street lightened up her little body and reflect her long, wet eyelashes on her face. The aperture around just like a halo shining on top of her head”. Because of the preparation, the process of writing the RIP essay became easier. Proving the usage of rhetorical methods in the RIP project and explaining the choices I made became the main topic of the essay.

Starting from optionally write down what pop up in my mind, I have changed to be a professional writer who can use rhetorical methods fluently to persuade the audience and show the significance of my writing. My abilities in reading, analyzing, and writing has improved to an upper level. This course not only teaches me a lot but also encourages me to push my limit and try something new. Benefit from the reading and analysis, I gain another ability to see the same thing through different perspectives and use my brain when I am reading: not simply see the typed characters but the hidden messages behind those words.