Rhetorically, writing to me is like a process of constructing buildings, if we could not organize and combine small pieces into a larger piece well, the building will collapse into the ruins due to the fact of the unstable basement. In other words, in order to build our writing skills higher and higher, we need to cumulate our fundamental skills first.

Before I took this course in the summer, I was very afraid about doing research since I need to read many papers or journals with thousands of words and I thought this may be boring to me. Compare to my self-assessment from the first week, as the ten-weeks study of writing research papers went to the end, I gained many inspirational ideas based on the course topic and all the research works had actually enlarged my basic knowledge capacity. Before I compose my own research paper, I was only able to analyze journals done by others. During the process of writing, I need to figure out the arguments I want to express to my audiences. Also, the course reading materials had also helped me a lot on generating my own ideas. The reason for me to learn other journals and writing these critical reading assignments is the way to construct our skills on how to utilize these arguments and cite them in our own papers with our analysis. Besides the theme of this course, the most significant writing issue for me is how to organize the content and how to make them logically connected. During the process of revising and reading my peer reviews, I had also learned how to make my paper to be more rhetoric and more convincing to readers.

Composing Process

For my writing process, I will first generate the topic I want to write with and them brainstorm for my own ideas about that topic, like how I compose my prewrite assignments for Advocacy Project and the Historical project:

The above picture is from my advocacy project prewriting assignment which I quickly generate my ideas with three supporting solutions. And the structure of my first draft is actually based on that. After the prewriting process, I would then search online about some related articles to further solidify my ideas since in order to fully prove one thing, I would need to compare my ideas with these related articles through many different aspects, like past to present, one region to another and so on. And from the process of making plans, I could make my paper to be more clear on the outline:

This outline image is from my historical project planning assignment which I had list all the component for my first draft and the content may be included for every component along with some detailed bullet points under them. Undoubtedly these two process had improved my writing efficiency since I could write my first draft with the ideas I generated before. And for the second time on thinking about the plan or prewrite I wrote before, I may have more ideas passing through my brain which could be added to my papers. For both of my projects, the first reading about the lives of New York nannies had played an essential role on generating my own ideas since both of my topics is about the distribution of men and women’s house works, I also derived ideas that why women tend to perform more household behaviors from nannies' job description and why women tend to do such job. Even though these small pieces assignments had helped me during the composting process, generating the thesis statement is still difficult for me since it cannot be made too general or too narrow. However, the revising process could solve these difficulties.

Revising process

The process of revision has helped me to learn ideas from other people’s perspective and by reading my own writings, again and again, I could imagine myself as the reader and then revise the way of telling information to audiences more logical and more reasonable. Most of the comments are useful and practical to me, since me peers may provide tips such as the formatting problems, where to put my subtitles, where to insert appropriate images and charts and which sentence could be changed to be more rhetorically:

Undoubtedly, Peer viewing is actually a quicker way for me to notice my weakness and how to deal with them. From the process of writing multiple drafts, I could make the organization of my paper to be increasingly better, with the more coherent pace to readers. While I’m changing the topic or the arguments, I also need to research for my multimodal examples again and again and my skill in locating useful resources also get improved. Therefore, the final paper would be the one with more convincing arguments and academic formatting.

On the other hand, reading my peers papers and providing suggestions to them had also provided me with more experience on reading others’ artifacts which is similar to me, unlike the resources I cited in my paper. For instance, 

This is the peer review for advocacy project proposal which I offered tips on how to make his solutions to be more detailed and practical. If the solution to his topic may be more vivid, the messages he wanted to express to his readers would be seemed more convincing. To me, revising each other’s paper is also a way of communicating. 

Rhetoric, Argumentation & Multi-modal Communication

To both of my project, my audience is all people globally, especially women and all people in lower women status countries. In order to advocate or persuade my audiences, I had developed my arguments from the historical facts to the recent phenomenon. And then claimed something like the past condition could not represent nowadays facts since the world is changing and why some ridiculous feudal rules should be eliminated. For example, in my advocacy final draft:

From this image, I clearly implied that the work distribution between men and women should not be considered on biological facts in the past since our lives are becoming more advanced. For most of my first drafts, my weakness is how to make proper arguments and organize them to be logically linked to motivate my audiences since sometimes, I would repeat my piece of argument in different paragraphs when I wrote a long paper. In order to make them connected and rhetorically linked to each other, I would read back my previous sentences to make modifications on the use of diction or even the topic sentence in each paragraph.

For the multi-modal part, various types of images could visualize my messages to the readers. In addition, they could not only make the research paper not too boring but also offer vivid analysis for my arguments. The cartoon image serves a satirical tone for arguments and statistical charts could make my arguments more convincing based on the concrete data. For example, for both these two projects, I had used charts to shaped different wages between men and women and something about workload since these real statistical data could make my arguments more concrete to readers. On the other side, finding multi-modal sources is also an interesting process when I was composing drafts.

Above all, except my improvements in these three areas, writing 39C had also constructed my confidence in writing further research papers, may be linked to my future careers. Actually, I had never written a paper with the minimum of 2500 words before I took this course, after writing the advocacy project, I had more skills in composing larger and longer papers. Based on the theme of this course, I had also enlarged my insight on the global women and gender issues from all the related resources and course readings. Especially during the process of rewriting and revising, it had also prevented me from stop thinking critically of my ideas and others’. I’m sure that there will be more challenges for me during my future path on writing, and I believe enough practicing could make me overcome these difficulties keep myself to be interested in the process of composing ideas.