Entering the class, I felt that my abilities as a writer were not too bad and not exceptional, but somewhere in between, average. Taking this writing course was really a different writing experience from what I had previously encountered, where credit was mostly being given for completing an assignment and teachers were helping students how to pass AP exams rather than giving more useful writing skills. Looking back now there was some definite changes that were made to my writing approach and style.

One of these changes was learning how to organize an essay like for the rhetorical analysis essay. Before I would have most likely tried to put off a bulk of the writing two days before it would have been due, but with the assignment there was a different element to help with organization of the essay, which were the annotated bibliographies. This was a different style of preparing for an essay than what I was used to. The annotated bibliographies helped to dissect a speech, letter or review to reveal some of the most basic elements like argument, audience and purpose. The work of completing these annotated bibliographies helped to guide what evidence I would be able to find most useful when writing my essay. They also helped me constantly stay aware of what type of audience I would be reaching out to, something where before I was not really sure of who I was writing to or for. Targeting a specific audience was something that was a problem of mine, which was able to be remedied.

For the very first assignment of the class, the rhetorical analysis was very important to helping me as a writer because it emphasized organization. Throughout the comments from the instructor and my peers I was able to create something that was more organized. Something that I found to help tremendously and one of the ways I was able to start the plans for my rhetorical analysis was through completing the RA outline where we had to create topic sentences which provided some information about what was going to be talked about for a specific paragraph.

                 In this picture above, there is a topic sentence from my RA outline which I was planning to utilize in my final draft of the RA.

Though I had thought that this was an acceptable topic sentence to use in my RA, I was still learning that topic sentences were more complex than I had originally thought. At first the topic sentence seemed fine for me and that where I had placed it in my outline was a great spot for me to have that paragraph in my RA. After receiving feedback on my outline I found that the topic sentence still needed revision and placement of that paragraph would be more effective earlier in my paper.

With some of planning having to do with finding passages to talk about, the suggestion to find passages that talked about the African-American identity as something unique was what helped to start making me think about to use rhetoric in my RA.

In my RA I was also able to learn more about rhetoric and how to use it throughout my essay. My first introduction paragraph, done through the outline, I had nothing that was attending to genre and most importantly, rhetoric. This was something that was concerning to me as the writer because the assignment was called, rhetorical analysis. I had difficulty constructing an introduction I think in most part because in the past I was taught not to give too much information about what was going to be said in the rest of the essay and the information that was going to be talked about usually lied towards the end of the introduction.

A picture of my original introduction and comments are below.

This was one of the biggest concerns that I had during the start of the RA. This kind of work before starting the first draft helped me to realize what was missing to create something that was coherent and effective. All I was really doing in my first introduction seemed to be summarizing what Coates was saying in his book. With comments from the professor I was able to identify what was causing problems for me to begin my RA draft and construct something that would lead me to have an essay that was not making points randomly.

On the left hand side, this is the introduction for my first draft in which I was able to create some rhetoric about family that I was going to provide in my essay with the question that is posed. Although I had crafted something that was better than the very first introduction I had, there was still some things I was able to refine. On the right hand side of the picture, that is my introduction for the final draft of the RA where I was able to have eliminated wordiness. Another thing I was able to eliminate was the mention of names that is found towards the end of the draft intro, which I learned to retract for the final draft because it implied those would be the only sources that were going to be talked about.

I found that this process of revising and then going back to edit my work was something that helped me look at my work, figure out what was working and what was not. The idea of constructing in my introduction to deconstruct throughout the rest of the RA was something that was fairly new to me. I had never spent as much time on an introduction before neither did I know that it was something just as important as the rest of the essay. This was something that I liked very much because instead of just writing blindly, this provided a sort of overview for what I had to write about, making the writing process not as overwhelming.

 Another element that I was able to utilize in writing 37 was the use of visuals in my work. Before I was never taught to include any type of visuals and something that was interesting to me was the fact that these visuals could also be a form of rhetoric. This is something that I took advantage of in my RA with the picture of Coates and his son Samori, showing the bond they have being family.

When it came to the RIP project, I had a general sense of what I wanted to talk about, but something that I felt was problematic for me was the amount of freedom that I was able to have with the project. For a majority of my writing career, I was always given a prompt and told what was needed to be written about. The experience I had with the RIP project was something that caught me off guard because I had never gotten the chance to try writing similar to it.

I will remember the RIP project as a completely new experience because of the different approach there was to creating a work of literature. First we started out with the preliminary plans. Through these plans I was able to better identify what I wanted to talk about. Even though this was a rough outline, it made me start thinking about what I wanted to start writing about and who I could potentially be reaching out to. Beginning to think about my topic, past exercises like completing annotated bibliographies for other assignments came up again. What I was able to do with this was begin to learn more about my topic to better inform those who would be reading about my RIP project.

Once completing these plans and completing the first draft of the RIP project, I had to meet with my peers outside of class to prepare for a presentation which I had never done before for any other type of writing or English class. This was interesting because I had to present my plans of what I wanted to write about to the entire class, who would question me afterwards, as well as question my peers. During this presentation I showed what was my first draft of my RIP project.

A picture of my first draft for the RIP project above, which looked more like an editorial rather than an interview.

When it was time to answer questions from the audience, which were my peers and my instructor, I quickly found that I had some problems with my RIP project. Some of these problems were with the fact that I did not know what kind of genre I wanted to choose for my project. I had chosen the genre of an interview, but when I had presented my first draft it seemed more like an editorial, which could use parts from an interview. This was something that I needed to fix immediately because a large part of the project dealt with what genre to use that would best express my view and exercise the use of rhetoric. Another problem I had was finding an audience, another important part of the project. After the presentations I realized that I had a lot to fix and what urgently needed to done was to conduct my interview. At first I had some hesitation towards the genre of an interview because I was a little intimidated to have the interview with someone like the dean at the School of Education.  

For my second draft, seen on the left, I was able to create questions that would hopefully be good enough to answer and convey my message throughout the project. I had been reading up on the topic so much that I lost some sight of my audience. I thought my questions were enough for my interviewee to answer them and give solid answers, but when reading comments from Professor Collins, seen on the right, I realized that I was assuming my audience knew just as much as I did on the topic. The questions I provided did not give any context for the reader and just jumped right into the matter. After realizing this I knew I had to step back on my questions to build up to more specific ones. Another thing that I was missing was the blurb at the beginning of interviews, which was something I worked on before I had the interview.

For my final draft I was able to refine some of my questions that led me to use follow-up questions in my interview as well. I also included the blurb at the beginning of the interview and a picture above it to help add more to the element of rhetoric.

Below is a picture of my final draft on the left and on the right is an interview that I tried to imitate from Rolling Stone.

In conclusion, I started my college writing career as an anxious and very perplexed student. Through Writing 37 I have been able to learn and grow as a writer, feeling that I am better able to articulate thought onto paper than before taking this course. Some of the crossovers that I was able to make between this class and another class I am taking is that there is not just one singular view, but there are many. History is viewed very different from readings through Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail, than say Malcolm X's "The Ballot or the Bullet." Reading Between the World and Me was the of the most eye-opening experiences for me, exposing me to the fear that those in a black body have to face, that others do not.

I can definitely walk away from this class saying that I was able to learn to be a more effective writer than I was before entering, learning exercises like taking annotated bibliographies on sources I plan to use in a work of literature to pre-writing tasks, like the preliminary planning for the RIP or outline for the RA. I learned about the different elements of writing - author, audience, purpose, message, argument - and was able to concentrate on what was lacking through the revision process. I learned the importance of specificity through this class, now knowing that being as specific as possible leaves little room for misinterpretation and you can connect to an audience more effectively, which keeps a reader reading. I can honestly say that this is my most enjoyable and will be my most memorable experiences at UCI, especially with the attention that professor Collins had with the students in the class to try and help everyone's writing. I hope to retain all this new knowledge I have from taking Writing 37 and look forward to the growth that I can achieve continuing on at UCI.