Reflecting back to my journey of Writing 39 sequence, I discover that my writing skills and thinking process have been gradually, increasingly challenged and improved by constructing various types of paper. In 39A, I received knowledge of how to integrate and analyze several forms of reading materials such as poetry, Shakespearean, science fiction and other genres. In 39B, I continued to develop my personal style of writing through learning different rhetorical strategies and applying them to my own pieces of work. Those two writing courses strengthened my capacity of how to influentially write with creativity and analysis. As I entered into another region of writing: 39C argument and research, the methods and components of writing shifted to a research base structure which required a new strategy: finding relevant sources to effectively support your claims and argument. I came in anxious and not very confident with how to write a research paper that especially using online research tools for finding evidence is the most challenging and arduous task. However, all of these fear and confusion with writing and research were disappeared now as I accomplished composing two research papers. After experiencing both difficulties and illumination during the process of research, I am now more comfortable to deal with obstacles and unpredictable outcomes after researching. Regardless of how challenging this course is, I made my best efforts to achieve little or big progress, which will show in different sections below.

 

Composing Process

During the process of generating these two research-based compositions, HCP and AP, I have learnt to question the credibility of the sources. Before I took Writing 39C, I used to rely on every source I found on the Internet, and I did not have a notion of questioning its credibility. As I looked back to my first sociology class, Sociology 1, I realized that I made a serious mistake in which I used pieces of evidence I found from the Wikipedia for my final research paper. Back then, I did not intend to question any source’s credibility as long as it supported my claim and convinced my audience to believe in my main idea of the paper. I lacked the knowledge of ensuring the quality of the paper overall. However, after I have written HCP and AP papers, I know that the credibility of the evidence is a significant root for building up a reliable and qualified research paper. For example, I tended to use outdated sources in my final paper in Sociology 1. However, in HCP, I used a book called The Civilian and the Military: A History of the American Anti militarist Tradition. I have questions its credibility because of the published year. Even though it was published in 1956, and might be considered as an outdated source for supporting my argument, it was totally useful in terms of providing a transition of American culture relating to militarism. The book stated facts and history of certain American tradition and trends about the influence of militarism, so it was relatively credible to use to support that the belief had changed during that certain period.

 

Figure 1

Caption: This is my annotation of the book The Civilian and the Military: A History of the American Antimilitarist Tradition, written by Arthur A. Ekirch and published in 1956. Even though I questioned its credibility due to its published year, the content simply provides the fact of cultural transition where I found it adoptable to support my historical context of both American anti-militarism and militarism.

 

Figure 2

 

 Caption: This is a photo of my notes taking in class in the beginning of 39C in which states that old books are allowable for giving a background of the material.

 

       To me, the steps of generating a research-based composition have both progressed instructionally and personally. According to the preliminary research exercise, I paid close attention and followed steps in AGWR. However, I developed my own steps of approaching the more detailed outline of HCP.

 

Figure 3

Caption: This is my rough outline of the HCP and the HCP Draft 1: Outline and Intro Paragraph I include in my composition 1 is a more thorough version of the outline. I found it more helpful and applicable to compose a detailed outline of my HCP on the paper before writing an outline following the instructor’s rule. Therefore, I spent two days to annotate articles and write an outline that was more helpful for writing the actual outline and introduction which I needed to turn in.

 

I also learned how to do research using Google Scholar and other searching engines more effectively. After reading the Chapter “Finding and Using Sources” in The Anteater’s Guide to Writing and Rhetoric, I discovered that research was not an easy task but required a lot of skills including how to try out better keywords, record useful sources, brainstorm additional keywords, and lastly annotate them as the major part.

Figure 4

 

Caption: The steps of preliminary research exercise. I took notes when I was reading the chapter on “Finding and Using Sources” in The Anteater’s Guide to Writing and Rhetoric. I followed every step to approach finding credible sources and making supportive analysis.

 

 Figure 5

 

Caption: This was the first step when I was trying to have a general understanding of militarism, and I set the published time range from 2005 to 2016 to get credible articles.

I became effective at pre-writing tasks throughout the process of writing drafts, source evaluations, and annotations. Writing drafts served as a major improvement of approaching to a better final draft. For HCP, classmates’ and the instructor’s advices of revising certain parts of the draft offered me the opportunities to make the organization more logical and add more contents for making my argument more effective. For example, in the first draft of HCP, Debby gave me comments about what are my paper’s strengths and weaknesses. In the introduction, I changed the order where I moved the sentence about causality to the beginning of the paragraph to grab my audience’s attention according to Debby’s advise. Also, I added several brief descriptions for different wars for clarifying even most people know their backgrounds. I maintained the significant amount of graphs, but in the final draft of HCP, I added multiple images for the purpose of emotional impact. Writing source evaluation and annotations play significant roles for composing an effective research paper. In the first section of Composition 2,

“Approach to AP”, I annotated, took notes, and highlighted key passages in every article and supportive sources or any piece of evidence I have found. These tasks were done before writing the first draft of AP. More annotations were completed after 2^nd draft of AP, under the title of “More AP Sources”, I searched more evidence to support the solution of militarism, and put a lot of time on finding solution for overcoming obstacles such as funding and law restrictions. These pre-writing tasks were challenging and fundamentally supportive in terms of writing the final draft either for HCP or AP.

 

 

Rhetoric, Argumentation, & Multi-modal Communication

According to the course description of 39C, “guided writing practice in argumentation, logic, and inquiry”, I know that the most significant essence of this writing course is having logic to play the major role in the process of creating an argumentative research paper. Writing these two papers is a grateful opportunity for me to be adept in writing research paper with proper strategies and overall structure. Before I took Writing 39C, applying multi-modal sources to academic paper was not common from my perspective. However, I know now that multi-modal evidence such as images, graphs, charts, videos, and other types of evidence besides text provides audience visual elements to advocate the argument. At the end of this course, I learned the fact that in an argumentative research paper, multi-modality offers visual evidence to collaborate the major text and thus it is an indispensable element.

In HCP final draft, I used a statistic chart to show how wars had huge impact on destroying people’s lives. The graph here showed the number of injures throughout the history of major U.S. wars. I integrated these number representations in a paragraph. I learned that I used this chart for supporting my claim that death is one of the major effects of militarism. By looking closely to the numbers, I made a conclusion that WWII had the highest death rate in all wars and because it involved more nations compared to other wars and it was the first war to use nuclear weapons. Without containing this chart, my argument would be weak that lacks visual and direct evidence. However, comparison and questions were made when my audience looked at these numbers that they engaged them to think what were the reasons behind the difference.

 

Figure 6a

 

Figure 6b

Caption: Figures 6a &b are a paragraph in HCP. Here the number chart or table shows the number of injuries throughout U.S. wars. I offered a brief interpretation of the multi-modal evidence following itself.

 

 Another example of using multi-modality in my AP was an insert of an image of the John Lennon Imagine Peace Tower in the conclusion paragraph. Instead of using statistic fact to convince the audience, in the conclusion of AP, I used patho to convince the audience that the idea of militarism must be overthrown. I introduced a speech from documentary Human delivering by a father of a victim whose daughter was killed due to political reason. He stated his idea of

Following by the conclusion, the image of the John Lennon Imagine Peace Tower brought the audience back to the two significant elements in life, love and peace. The blue light is shinning straight up into the beautiful sky that symbolizes peace and hope. Yoko Ono delivers lament to her husband John Lennon, the cofound of the Beatles, the most successful band in the history of popular rock music. This image reflects that individuals such as Lennon who had spent their entire lifetimes promoted the belief of peace are not alone and still fighting for . The calling of promoting peace should be our human mission. Multi-modal evidence strengthens the emotional aspect of promoting peace to the audience.

 

Figure 7a and 7b

 

 

 

 

Revision

Revision is a product of feedbacks from both my instructor and classmates and it played a major role for generating an improved final draft. In my HCP first draft, I received a lot of comments and suggestion of revising from Debbie who helped me to do peer review in class.

Figure 8a

Figure 8b

 

Figure 8c

Caption: Figure 8a, b, and c show an example of the process of how I have done for most of the revision. 8a) After my peer reviewer looked at the introduction, she made comment on how I can improve the level of attention-grabbing by reorganizing the structure of this paragraph. 8b) This is the passage in my HCP 1^st Draft in which I inserted the statistics in the middle of the introduction. 8c) I moved this piece of information to the beginning of the introduction for the purpose of increasing the level of seriousness of this social problem. I revised those details one by one and if I found that new sources were mandatory to carry my message further, then I would try out new keywords for better sources.

 

Figure 9a A passage in HCP 1^st Draft

Caption: Here, I was trying to introduce the idea of how militarism has developed because of the influence of WWI history. However, it lacked a smooth transition to connect the purpose and the content itself. My instructor pointed it out because she did not understand the reasons I brought up this. This comment enabled me to notice that I need to add more information in order to make this paragraph viable.

 

Figure 9b A passage in HCP Final Draft

 

Caption: After taking in advice from my instructor, I added, “Rise and decline of anti militarism both have been prospered in the United States in different periods. Before WWI, anti militaristic value had been influenced by the American cultures and whereas as a cause of WWI…” to state the topic sentence more clear and define the purpose of the introduction of WWI influence.

 

Figure 10a

 

Figure 10b

 

Caption: Figure 10a and 10b above showed an example of the reconstruction of the structure of AP in which I relocated a piece of evidence of how education has influenced students’ view of militarism. In the 1^st draft of AP, I had this piece of evidence about religious influence after I introduced some existing examples of peace education. However, this insert was not connecting to the previous idea of Nobel Women Initiative’s conference about introducing peace education. Therefore, I moved this paragraph towards the beginning where I introduced how different ways of education was influenced people’s point of view about wars and militarism. In the final draft of AP, I had this piece of evidence after introducing how Japanese history teaching has influenced on new generations’ belief of glorifying war. These two pieces of evidence both advocated the idea that militarism could be strongly influenced by education; therefore, they must be introduced next to each other for obtaining a more organized structure of the paper.

 

Figure 11a Annie’s comment on AP Draft 2

Figure 11b Revision

Caption: Figures 11a and 11b are another example of revision for AP. In the first draft of AP, there was no implementation which summarized what were my plans and what were the obstacles that I would face. Therefore, I added a paragraph that somehow provided a brief implementation and possible obstacles I would encounter. However, I know that this final draft was not complete and it lacked a lot of details for approaching my solution. If there is still opportunity for making another revision, I will do more research on education laws in the United States and come up with a more thorough plan of educating peace and the methods of resolving its obstacles.

 

 

Transfer

This course is the most challenging course I have ever taken in UCI. However, I feel grateful for taking this course as a memorable experience for pushing my strength of writing beyond my limitation. Throughout Writing 39 Sequence, I have frequently absorbed knowledge of different types of writing skills and faced different obstacles. Even though Writing has been considered my weakest subject due to the fact that I am not an English native speaker, I am impressed of how this course has extended my interest in writing besides analyzing passages and using rhetorical strategies to deliver main message. Looking for credible sources was the indispensable element of constructing this new form of paper. As I mentioned during “composing process”, there were multiple steps of doing effective online researching. The transition between the previous Writing 39 courses and this one challenged my transitional thought of composing paper. I strongly believe that in the future such multi-modal elements will also appear in my textbooks. As a physics major, I constantly need to accept abstract scientific concepts.

 

Figure 12

Caption: Here is a screenshot of my Modern Physics textbook. It also involved multi-modal elements to collaborate with the text. The abstract idea of people seeing identical time even though they are standing in different locations can be showed through this figure.