Time flies by, Writing 39A has almost come to an end for this semester. Although the teaching environment and issues regarding public health made everything more challenging during Covid-19 than before, I still learned a bunch of knowledge and new writing skills in the three-month study. Before taking Writing 39A, I have always considered myself as a bad writer. I was never confident enough to say that I could write a well paper. However, the good thing is that taking this course helped me overcoming the problem of lack of confidence when writing academic articles. The writing skills I learned and what the professor discussed during class bring me the confidence and always spur and motivate me in seeking progress in writing.

        Throughout the course, we have two main assignments which are the “conflict paper” and the “what is happiness paper”. Each of them has to write two drafts and a final draft. Each draft can be very helpful to the overall idea and the article structure. For example, when you finish writing a draft, you can read the whole draft several times and find out where you can modify it better, because writers don’t actually realize the problems generated when writing. This may eventually result in going too far away from the topic scale assigned by professor. In the process of finding and modifying problems over and over again, the purpose and function of drafts making the whole article better have been achieved.

        Peer review is a great inspiration that has been very helpful to me. When my peers read my paper, they are the audience which they analyze my article from the perspective of readers, so they see a different view than me and they can give a comprehensive evaluation of my writing to help me compose a better paper. In-class discussion is a quick brainstorm for us to come up ideas. I enjoy  group-activity to discuss and communicate and share thoughts with other classmates. Their opinions are often unique and creative which can definitely inspire me. When I get inspired and come up with new ideas, I discuss with them and inspire them in another way. This positive feedback is mutual, benefiting everyone participated in the group work.  

        When writing the “conflict paper”, I tried many different writing methods and techniques to improve the quality of the paper, in the meanwhile, I also learned new writing skills. Since this paper is a personal narrative paper, the focus is on my own experience. The topic of my essay is the understanding and experience of religious belief when I was in high school in the United States. How to completely and perfectly express what I want to express is not an easy thing. It is also very important for me to bring the readers a sympathetic feeling. In class, I learned professional writing skills to improve these two points. I learned to make the article more vivid and touching by describing more details, including character dialogue, action, scene setting and inner feelings. I add these details to make readers feel more empathetic, like they were in my shoes experiencing the whole story. When writing draft 1, my entire paper is like a simple statement of what happened. It tells, not shows. Think of what professor mentioned in class, we need to make sure that our paper is showing the story rather than telling the story when writing a personal narrative essay. Draft 1 is boring to read which is not able to interest the audience to keep on reading the entire story. After realizing this problem, I added a lot of details and the essay reads more smoothly than before revision.

       When I was writing my second happiness essay, I encountered great difficulties. This assignment is different from what I thought at the beginning. Professor asked what is happiness in class. I have some thoughts in my mind. When I wrote the first draft, I wrote a lot of personal understanding about happiness. I thought I wrote very well. I asked the professor to read my essay for revising suggestion in class on a Tuesday. I was expecting the professor to say this is a nice work and go ahead keep on working it. However, the professor said that I wrote too much about personal understanding and experience and ignored that this is an academic research paper, which is different than the previous personal narrative paper. In other words, I should have more academic references and evidence to increase the credibility of my article. Professor’s words made me realize that an academic research assignment is not persuasive and convincing enough to the audience if it is not supported by adequate academic article evidence and quotation. I revised the draft and added more references to academic articles to support my main standpoint: Happiness is brought through interpersonal relationships. We interact with different types of people and have different kinds of relationship all life long. They could be friendship, family bond, romance relationship. Peer review also helped a lot to write this paper. The first draft I lacked evidence and quotation from academic research and I was not aware of this issue. My classmate pointed out this problem and inspired my revision of the whole paper. The combining of professor’s suggestion and peers’ opinion is brilliant and work perfectly to help students to write better essays.

        I have learned so much from Writing 39A this semester and I’m exciting and ready to take 39B for winter semester!!