Coming into this class, Writing 39C, I was scared; the sheer amount of course work and research that was required for the class intimidated me considering that I never really viewed myself as being exceedingly comfortable with writing and research. With the course now coming to a close, I now have some time to reflect upon what I have experienced from this course and what I can learn from said experiences. Writing 39C took me out of my comfort zone, forcing me to not only argue for my own original ideas, which I previously had not done in any classes prior to my college-level writing courses, but also to do my own research to help support these ideas. In addition, this course introduced me to concepts, such as multi-modality, that helped broaden my own academic writing style. And while there were many grueling nights during this quarter that I stayed up reading sources, writing drafts, and revising my work, I can now say that my grasp of both the writing process and writing academic papers has considerably improved compared to when I first started this class. 

Transferring What You Know

Since I came to college, my writing style has changed a lot. As I state in my Self-Assessment assignment, the essays and papers that I wrote prior to the 39 series, and college, were often structurally bland with very few original ideas. I often struggled with writing in general as well and thus felt very unconfident with my writing abilities going into UCI. And even after taking two courses on writing this year, it would be wrong to say that I’m not 100% confident in my own writing abilities. Yet, as I look back at my time in Writing 37 and Writing 39C, I can say that these classes have equipped me with the proper tools and knowledge to consistently produce university-level essays. 

Writing 37 taught me the fundamentals of writing good papers. In this class, I learned that rhetoric is key to effectively arguing claims and points that I make in my papers. Moreover, effective argumentation requires the author to consider the audience, the context in which a text is written in, and the three modes of persuasion. While I was aware of these rhetorical devices prior to my college writing courses, I never actually employed them; as I state in my Self-Assessment, my high school English teachers never forced me to think since a simple regurgitation of in-class analysis of a text was enough to garner me a decent grade. Yet, when Writing 37 tasked me with coming up with my own analysis for a text, I realized the importance of using these rhetorical devices whenever I make an argumentative or persuasive text.

While Writing 37 formed the baseline of my understanding of college-level writing, Writing 39C diversified this understanding and helped to make me a relatively self-sufficient college writer. In other words, there are a few takeaways from Writing 39C that I think are important. One example of this is how to research a topic. Prior to Writing 39C, I never really had to dig for my own sources or analyze scholarly texts to use in my own writing. Yet, with the help of the modules from this class, I’ve come to learn how to effectively search for and dissect texts. Moreover, the types of keywords I use, whether I’m looking for a scholarly source or popular source, and what kind of database I use to find sources are all important factors to be conscious of when looking for good sources to use in my paper. The other takeaways of topic refinement, multi-modality, and the value of peer and professor reviews are all exemplified in the following subsections.

Composing Process

Prior to Writing 39C, I never took the writing process for my papers very seriously. Moreover, I never felt that the prewriting assignments that I had for previous writing and English classes engaged me to think critically; I often perceived these assignments as busy work rather than tools that were aimed at helping me improve my papers. However, when I entered this class and realized how much effort I had to put into crafting coherent arguments and finding good research to support said arguments, I realized that I couldn’t just “wing it” like I did for many other previous essays. My process of narrowing down a topic for my two course papers best exemplifies this sort of academic maturity as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1 represents the evolution of the focus of my CP paper, and thus my AP paper. In the CP prospectus, I start off with a relatively broad topic, discussing both general and sexual harassment in video games. As I moved towards writing my first rough draft for the CP, I realized much of my research discussed general harassment in video games and thus I switched my topic of my CP accordingly. Finally, just prior to the drafting phase of my final CP, I decided to instead focus on aggression in general with the help of my peers’ and professor’s comments. 

From this experience, I learned that picking topics for writing papers is a dynamic process rather than a static one. In other words, topics are ideas that should be molded by the research and the feedback that goes into crafting a paper rather than vice versa. 

Rhetoric, Argumentation, & Multi-modal Communication

Multi-modality is another concept that I was introduced to in this class that had a profound impact on my argumentation methods for my essay. At the beginning of the quarter, I had no idea what multi-modality was or how to integrate it into my essay; adding pictures in an academic essay was a completely foreign concept to me. In my first CP draft, my unfamiliarity with the concept of multi-modality showed and thus I knew that I needed to get some help in understanding how to make my composition multi-modal and how to interact with the images that I chose in my essays. Figure 2 demonstrates this fact accordingly. In the figure, the image that was meant for multi-modality is awkwardly dropped into the essay without any context. I had previously thought that the images were meant to be standalone, self-explanatory things that helped to illustrate already existing points in the body paragraphs, hence the figure. However, after peer reviews and professor feedback, I came to learn that multi-modal elements of an essay should be treated as if it was a quote; they are their own reference points of analysis just like any other type of evidence in writing. Furthermore, multi-modal elements can serve as better artifacts in terms of supporting claims made within a paper than their text-based counterparts. In other words, it’s sometimes better to show the audience what I mean by a claim rather than to use quotes to exemplify an argument.

Throughout this quarter, I have written three total multi-modal compositions and while I think I still have a bit of trouble integrating pictures into my texts, I think it is an interesting way to engage the reader. Pictures within an academic text can help to further reinforce a claim being made in a paragraph, for example, and also breaks up the monotony of traditional text-only essays. Overall, this introduction to multi-modality has brought a breath of fresh air into my writing career and I think that is an important takeaway from this experience.

Revision

Throughout the quarter, I utilized many office hours and peer reviews in order to better my writing. Prior to this course, I never believed in going to office hours or taking peer reviews seriously; when I was in high school, I never had many opportunities to have one-on-one conversations with my English teachers and as such, I never came to realize how useful office hours may be. Yet, when I began to read the prompts for the major assignments and started my drafting processes, I found myself confused in many scenarios and in need of help. In the AP, for example, I found it particularly hard to find research on my chosen solution and after spending many hours on Academic Search Complete and Google, I knew I needed help. To solve this problem, I decided to go to the professor considering that he had left me a note in his professor feedback on my paper that one of his fields of study pertained to the solution that I had chosen within my AP. Figure 3 shows the questions that I asked the professor during an office hours appointment and the subsequent revisions I made to my paper following said appointment. 

On the left side you can see the questions that I asked the professor and the corresponding feedback he gave to each question. The answer to question three had a particular impact on my paper considering that much of the context that my AP had originally had in its first draft was more about the nature of video games rather than the historical context of my chosen solution. This is the clearest example of the effectiveness of my office hour appointments during these past 10 weeks.

However, this was not my only office hour visit during the quarter. The realization of the effectiveness of office hours and feedback from others came very early in the quarter with the CP draft. And because I have had a lot of exposure this quarter to different kinds of criticism from both my peers and my professor, I’ve begun to develop my own critical mindset to my own writing. In other words, I’ve come to learn to look at how exactly are authors, including myself, are engaging the claims that they put forward in their papers. Moreover, it’s important to consider how different pieces of evidence affect the rhetoric of the paper.

Transferring What You Know Cont.

I want to do research in my field of study during my time at UCI and I know that any future lab reports that I produce will require me to employ the things I learned in Writing 39C. For example, if I write about my findings from a study that I conducted, I know that I will have to employ multi-modality to show any graphs or charts that I may have and I know that I will have to include other scholarly articles within my own to provide evidence for my claims. Because I have these kinds of ambitions and know that I will have to do these kinds of writings within the near future, I am thankful for the time