My name is Qilin Li and is the writer of this ePortfolio.

     As many people have mentioned, Writing 39C wasn't an easy nor relaxing class even at the first few weeks. I have been putting tons of workload every week for this course and mainly I would like to share few of my own insights both on myself as a writer in this class and how it helped me progress into future academic life or career

     Beginning this quarter, we are asked to construct an introspective self-assessment prior to reading or writing any academic essays. I had a good chance to slow my pace down and start thinking about my role as an writer in academic writing again. 

     One can see from colored words that I started writing about my experience in an rather relatively early time slot when I wan't even aware of academic writing purpose. In my high school class, we had an very advanced writing class called "intro to academic writing" where I discovered the path to better writing. I learned my first writing class word "persuade" in that very special class and failed to truly understand what does it mean to actually write with purpose when submitting my first essay. All I previously know is that we write to record our emotions when I am writing my diary and telling people where the postal office is when I am writing my English little essay. 

     Later as I prepared my SAT test, I gradually figured out the meaning of several strategies like "ethos", "pathos", "logos". And I had a first impression of writing purpose which is finding out the hidden strategies author uses in the paragraphs and conjunctions. It was like playing word solving puzzles. Both hard and entertaining when you finally had everything you known discovered. Writing to me has a different meanings, then. It's not how I just being "forced" to take in informations from textbooks or famous poems, but an codebook where I find individual strategy and decipher them with past experience. 

     But knowing any of these strategies' name won't be very useful while reading as an reader. I took academic writing class series to further strengthen my reading and writing skills. Through series 20A-C, I learnt that every sentence had meanings and more importantly, purposes when author meant to convey ideas or simply add credibility in readers' mind. Both as a reader and a writer, I had improved my ability to discern main arguments lie between sentences and strategies that may convey certain influence on the audiences' side. To me at that point, I enjoyed reading as an professional critic where I read words and sentences not just accept how it was presented to me but to actually going to the next level as to question myself the credence of the sources and arguments of the specific article or passage. And as a writer at this time, I would be more concerned with the reader's side. Also generally referred to as "putting yourself into audience's shoe" when I am trying to understand this phenomenon. It was also at this time when I gained access to our precious UCI library website and stride my very first step in searching for scientific papers and academic reviews. This wasn't an pleasant process honestly speaking, but is one that actually brought you with valuable information and strengthened data-collection ability. I used to struggle about add credibility into my essay as an non-professional student who is trying to write some advanced topics like insomnia. I find cite professional articles from recent years with famous publishers or authors. There is usually an "translation" period when I am compiling every useful information regarding my essay topic into sentences that are both straightforward and intuitive to the general readers as I normally writes with general public as target group.

     Not long after Academic English series, I took Writing 39AP where I had my other aspects of writing trained. For example, in Writing 39AP, I specifically take two weeks of time to build my resume from scratches and refine it. This was totally different from how academic essay was doing in that I have to summarize everything about myself, work experiences and expertise. Luckily, this is also about adding credibility to the readers. I smoothly went through every aspect of my past academic life and internships that I had as an student. I made it to finally write up an first draft and final draft of my essay through the ability trained from earlier before.

     As my last lower division writing course here at UCI, I have many faith and hopes in 39C in further upgrade my ability to think like an professional reader and write as an credulous author. One of my few envisions to the future 39C which I am going to learn and practice is to further strengthen my ability to locate and summarize important arguments in several or events whole paragraphs. And finally convert it into several more concise sentences to persuade my audience of something. I aim to add more coherence and logic to the sentences I have developed and presented.

     It wasn't long till I get my first practice upon information gathering and refinement. I have chose water quality as a topic under the main climate change topic. In order to successfully convey and prove my future context project essay, I searched over many scientific articles to gain more information. As you can see from above, there are four different citations each representing an different perspective of climate change on water quality.

     The first should be the easiest one to write about for I lack the expertise in water quality and everything seems so important to my essay. It was the changes in air, temperature and nutrients as three main influencers to deteriorating water. And that should be enough three arguments for my first draft of context project in the future. Yet as more and more articles I browsed through, I gradually see connections or at least the arguments that can be added to the one I discovered later. For instance, the second citation is relevant to the first one in that it derive the topic from surface water quality to the drinking water quality of ours. And I think that would be a good transition and progression in my essay . This drinking water issue is related to each of us and I can see how readers would feel urgent about this issue when it's closely relate to them. Trying to combine as many perspectives as possible, I also included the low flow and high flow of flood, droughts and long term feet of global warming. 

     As an writer, I had so many ideas in the beginning to use and only few or one of them will finally appear on my paper. For my CP and AP assignments, they are certainly the two most time consuming and hardworking practices that I have done in 39C, I made incorporated many unnecessary information in my CP and AP projects . And I made many proposals, drafts and revisions throughout the time.

     I have been writing about water quality this entire quarter. For CP, it's about the specific reasons to the deteriorating water caused by water quality and human activities' damage to water quality as a whole. I also included social issues like municipal waste water discharges and drinking water quality issue. And for my AP, I mainly write about Clean Water Act as an proposal to better water quality. After done with the two essays, I certainly felt more comfortable with dealing academic sources and articles.

     The works presented above are a first step to showcase my improvements and thinkings throughout this course, I will still have more detailed discussions upon CP and AP in the next pages.