Hello! Welcome to my Writing 39b Portfolio.

Crazy how fast Winter quarter of my first year flew by. Coming into writing 39B I thought I was going to dislike it because I’m not the best at writing essays or sometimes even being creative. But Cassie Dowd changed the way I now feel about that. Immediately on the first day of class she introduced to us to speculative fiction which I found extremely interesting. It was great to finally engage in a new genre for my readings. Speculative fiction was based on science fiction, fantasy, and horror and it truly strengthened and enhanced my critical thinking as I read these short stories in my book “The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin”.

This quarter was my time to shine, I needed to improve in myself and my academics and although things got hard, I managed to get through it and use my writing class as a way to make me feel better. The RIP and the RA assignments were both interesting to me and surprisingly I enjoyed getting them done. Through the use of resources we used, research, peer reviews, group activities, and online discussions I was able to feel confident in my writing in the end. My favorite assignment was the RIP project because it was interesting for our own selves to come up with an unnatural creature and create a project and an essay that distinguished an actual message of life. I feel that the easiest part of this class was the reflections at the end of each class. We were able to reflect on work we had done and it helped me see where I was at in terms of my progress. I enjoyed informing Cassie that all the group activities and peer reviews were extremely helpful and allowing her to know how I felt throughout the class. Group activities were my favorite part of the class because we were able to get into a group with a few of our classmates and share valuable information with each other as well as give each other feedback so that we could improve our writing.

My writing improved since I wrote my RA for this class, one of the group activities was where each group contained students of the same story we were writing our RA on. Here, I realized that I was not supposed to just summarize the whole short story “Bloodchild” in my essay. I needed to instead tell the audience the message I believed Octavia Butler was trying to convey, choose rhetorics that the author included, and and then explain how she did so to convey this exact meaning in her short story. We did research and Cassie introduced me to google scholar where I was able to do research for my RA essay. I had never used google scholar, but I thank her for bringing this upon us because now I am able to find resources for the future papers that I write. I learned a lot about critical reading, authors include different and plenty of rhetorical devices in their writing and while reading I was able to find and explore about the many rhetorical devices they wrote with. From using similes, exaggeration, hyperboles, alliteration, irony, to using ethos, pothos, and logos in order to appeal to the audience in certain ways. I was able to critically think as I read the short stories such as “Bloodchild” which was my favorite because it was very odd and I had never read something like it. I was able to form my own judgments about readings based on information I was given, observations I had, and from reflections. I’d like to thank Cassie Dowd for making my experience of writing 39b here at UCI an amazing one. Every class I was able to say I enjoyed it and I learned something new and useful to continue my path as a writer and thinker.