I had a lot of expectations coming in the Writing 39C. I heard a lot of stories from previous years, about equally split on whether or not 39C was more difficult than 39B. Despite the stories, I wanted to approach the new class with a degree of optimism. I figured a class where I could define my own topic, set my own reading list, and take my writing in practically any direction I wanted to would be a refreshing change of tempo from the exclusively literary writing classes I had taken up to that point in my studies. While most of my expectations about the class and were pretty close, I greatly underestimated the difficulty in writing in-depth about a given topic, even though I was the one who picked it. I had difficulty picking a topic, finding relevant sources, and conveying in-depth information and arguments, but in that difficulty I honed important writing and research skills that will help me in my upper division writing program and my engineering career beyond that.

Essay Structure

    One of the major things I learned this quarter, is that the structure of an essay should not interfere with the information that is trying to be conveyed. Trained my whole academic life to write 5 paragraph essays, I naturally wrote my first draft of by HCP as a discussion about cybersecurity problems at the national, commercial, and individual levels. The initial essay was way to shallow and lacked any in-depth discussions of solutions or historical perspectives. It was trying to do too much at once in a form that was rather restrictive. There was a discussion about the lack of preparedness by the government, the convenience vs. security decisions made by companies, and the privacy vs. security debate on the individual level. I tried to bridge the topics occasionally, but the end result was usually shallow and awkward. 

"The increasing interconnectedness brought by the internet and the rise of the digital age, has created new vulnerabilities faster than many people, companies, and governments could keep pace with, causing an immediate need for an increase in Cybersecurity to protect personal, commercial, and government information."

This was the original thesis I proposed in my HCP prospectus. As you can see, it attempts to cover the protection of "personal, commercial, and government information," a topic which is so broad yet just vague enough that I still attempted to cram it into a 5 paragraph essay.

After reviewing my first draft, I finally accepted that the 5 paragraph essay was inadequate to fully express the entire universe of cybersecurity problems. What followed was good, but could have been better. I decided to narrow my discussion of cybersecurity and to add additional paragraphs where needed. I dropped the individual level from my essay, leaving behind just governmental and corporate levels. I then blended the two of them together, claiming that they face many of the same problems such as cyber-crime and infrastructure destruction. Finally I expanded my 4 paragraphs (5 minus the individuals section) into a more natural essay format by adding more paragraphs to explain additional detail. The end result felt a little less organized to me, and I definitely could have benefited from an outline, but by cutting out unnecessary information and dialing in the specifics of my argument, I was able to write a much more complete paper on the historical background of national cybersecurity.

Organizing my Research

    With a new essay form decided upon, I was ready to fill it with interesting facts from my many well-managed sources, or was I? In some ways researching for my HCP and AP was easy because it was centered around a topic of my choosing that I already read a lot about anyway. In other ways however, finding scholarly articles that were relevant to my specific slice of the cybersecurity problems took a little more effort. Actually applying each source and attempting to use them in conversation with each other was even harder. In writing my HCP and AP, I learned a few research strategies that made these tasks more manageable.

    I learned how to strategically search online databases such as AntPack and others. Using a certain set of keywords can help produce better search results. Over time, as I read more and more sources, I began to pick up the keywords used by experts in my topic. For example changing my search terms from “National Cybersecurity” to “Public-Private Cybersecurity Model” helped me to find new articles that were better tailored for my AP essay.

After so much searching, I finally found the perfect source for my AP

    I also learned that organizing my outline by sources used in each paragraph helps to better put sources in conversation and really helps with keeping on top of citations later on. As mentioned earlier, I was transitioning to a more open essay structure and having some difficulty with maintaining organization. I was also having some trouble remembering which sources to cite for which paragraphs, and I missed a lot of citations in my HCP. By simply adding this additional step to my outlining process, I was able to use multiple sources much more effectively and keep track of my citations.

    One research tip I wish I could have adhered to for longer was the maintenance of an annotated bibliography. Annotated bibliographies are helpful because they provide a summary of essential information contained within a source. I created one for early work on my HCP, and those early sources that I annotated were some of my most frequently used sources. Having that quick summary of key points for my sources was extremely helpful in-between revisions when I was looking for additional evidence. As time grew more valuable, however, I cut the practice in favor of just using descriptive file names for each of the sources my sources folder. If I was looking for information on the costs of cyber-crime, I would simply look in my collection of sources for one called something like “The Costs of Cyber Crime in America” and skim it for a refresher on key points. In hindsight, maintaining an annotated bibliography would have probably helped me more fully use my sources and with citations, but in the shadow of an impending deadline, the time investment didn’t seem so appealing.

Advocacy Presentation

    In addition to practicing my research techniques and writing methods this quarter, I was also able to practice my presentation skills. The presentation was actually my favorite part of the class because after spending a quarter research for my HCP and AP essays, I was brimming with cybersecurity facts that my roommate was getting noticeably tired of listening to. In my engineering classes I have to present on a semi-regular to my teammates, my TAs, and sometimes even the whole class, so any opportunity to practice power-point creation, public speaking, and answering questions is good and applicable experience. I approached this presentation as I would a presentation to business people rather than engineers. As much as I would have loved to dive into the benefits of the public-private model of cybersecurity in terms of backdoors and day-zero explodes, that wouldn’t have been the most effective way to advocate my solution to my particular audience. I chose to abstract away a lot of the details, and focus more on the potential consequences of not boosting cybersecurity, a discussion that is much more real to the average audience member. Adding multimodal elements such as graphs, images, or animations helps abstract details into trends, set the intended tone of a side, and draw attention to specific details that support my argument. The presentation skills I practiced here in 39C are definitely going to continue being important even as I complete by designated writing requirements and move on to a more focused engineering schedule of study.

Utilizing Multimodal Elements

    I already mentioned how the use of multimodal elements helped me a lot in my presentation. Using images and graphs in my presentation really came naturally to me. While the idea of breaking up a dense presentation with graphical elements already made a lot of sense to me, the thought of doing the same in a more formal essay was a lot harder for me to adjust to. While I did manage to apply multimodal elements in my HCP and AP, they always felt extremely forced to me, and initially I just added them to fulfill the requirement.

    I started to get a better grasp on how to use media effectively though after one of Lisa’s lectures on the topic and by observing what my peers were doing through peer reviews. I realized I could divide multimodal elements into two basic groups, emotional/tonal elements and informational elements. An emotional or tonal element exists to give the composition or presentation a certain tone desired by the writer. Most of the time they’re images of physical things (people, objects, places) that already have a certain tone about them that the user of the image wants to tap into.

This tonal element appeared in my HCP along with the caption "Image showing the physical defenses around the Natanz nuclear facilities in Iran. Ultimately those watchtowers and that anti-aircraft gun proved powerless against Stuxnet." I felt that The image helped to juxtapose old a new ideas of warfare. Iran had set up all these physical defenses, and yet still had 20% of their nuclear production capabilities destroyed by a cyber attack they were powerless to stop.

Informational elements exist to take a lot of complicated or just overly detailed data points and turn them into easily understandable trends or statistical facts. These are usually graphs or charts of some sort that are organized to interpret some data and present it in a way that supports the writer’s argument.

This image from my AP presentation is a good example of what I would consider to be an informational element. Many detailed and technically involved data points were crushed down into this powerful yet simple chart that helped me make a few key points about the state of cybersecurity. Also, having such a busy image empowers me to control how the image is used, because chances are the audience is only going to look at and understand the parts of it that I explain.

Not every example of multimedia will fit into this system, but for the sake of writing essays on national cybersecurity, I found this mental framework helped me translate my media skills from presenting into my essays.

    Approaching multimodal elements in this way helped me to use them more effectively in my writing. I used elements to complement my paragraphs. More technical paragraphs were paired with good tonal elements to help provide a context for all the information I was slinging at the reader. My paragraphs that were mostly claims and really could have used more evidence were often paired with my informational elements, helping to sell my claims a little better given the additional evidence provided by the graph/chart. This system allowed me to concentrate the focus of my writing on a single purpose, and then I could compensate for a lack of clarity or evidence by using multimodal elements. I’m still trying to understand how to best use media in my writing, but 39C gave me a lot of practice and a new perspective on the use of non-textual elements.

    Writing 39C was unlike any other writing class I’ve taken so far. I was able to write about a topic of my own choosing. I did more research here than in any other class, learning new techniques for source organization and integration. I practiced my presentation skills, specifically on taking a highly technical topic and preparing it in a way that is relatable to the general public. Finally, I gained a new perspective on non-textual elements in my writing and learned how to implement them more successfully. Many of these skills will continue to be useful to me as I continue to my upper division writing and my future engineering career beyond that.