Transferring What You Know

Drag to rearrange sections
Rich Text Content

The WR39 series of courses at UCI have challenged me as a writer in ways that were not necessary in my High School writing classes. As I have mentioned in my Week 1 Self-AssessmentLinks to an external site., writing has been something that I had been quite comfortable and confident in. My writing and research tactics have served me well throughout the years and I have seen successful and satisfying results because of it. The WR39 series of courses, however, have challenged me to go beyond what I am comfortable with and discover new ways to approach research, argument, and composition. My researching habits have definitely changed since I learned to differentiate and appreciate the perks of scholarly and popular resources. I realized that there is more to research than merely clicking on the top few sources that appear. Since I have been introduced to academic search engines, I have come to realize that key terms are crucial when researching specific topics. This has significantly enhanced my practice of approaching a research topic and creating an argumentation around it. I have written many argumentative essays in the past, yet I have never written an essay that integrated multimodal composition the way our context and advocacy projects did. A lot of the writing insecurities I discuss in my Week 1 Self-AssessmentLinks to an external site., have to do with my “training” to stay within the given template. Through these two research assignments, I think that I was able to evolve the writing habits that I have learned in the past to express and convey more of myself. I still write essays in the general format that I am used to, however with the flexibility and creative aspect provided through using multimodal sources, I think that I was able to exercise a wider range in my writing ability. I have noticed that these changes to my writing practices are also reflected in my performance in other courses as well. I have come to fully realize that rhetoric is found everywhere. Writing prompts in my other subjects may not require a full rhetorical analysis of an issue, but will most likely ask for me to state a claim and discuss my understandings. The skills I have obtained in this class to construct argumentation have been extremely beneficial. In turn, these other classes have allowed me to see essay formatting in a different light. In the past, many of my writing experiences involved a strict guideline, which ultimately forced me to believe that essays should be written one way. I now understand that these guidelines are meant to ensure you cover all the details necessary for your argument. Organization is critical in presenting your argument in a cohesive manner and allow the reader to easily follow along. Since non-writing courses mainly care about the information, and not the formatting, I’ve started to try and do the same for my essays. 

rich_text    
Drag to rearrange sections
Image/File Upload
Screen Shot 2022-03-15 at 4.26.25 PM.png
attachment 18203664  
Drag to rearrange sections
Rich Text Content
rich_text    

Page Comments