How did Writing 39B, its two main assignments, many mini assignments, reflections, and readings help me become a better writer? 

          I will go into the depth of mainly the two primary assignments which were the Genre Analysis Essay and the Imitation Project. I also wanted to add, that these assignments didn't only make me a better writer, but they also allowed me to be better at ancylosing and processing any information given to me. 

          First of all, I will not say that writing the genre analysis essay was easy, especially that I chose a challenging topic to work with, which was relating magic to science fiction. However, having made this choice, knowing that I will have a hard time using a lot of the recourses that were provided, encouraged me to look into the subject even more deeply. It taught me to be able to dig information more meticulously, even if the idea I'm looking for isn't explicitly stated. That's how I looked at Suvin's Essay about the science fiction genre. He did mention magic but not in the way I wanted it to be for me to use it in my essay. But despite that, I was able to use his words and not only use it as a support for my argument, but I also challenged his opinion in order to get my point across. This part of the essay is highlighted in yellow on page 2 of my GA essay posted in this section of the portfolio: Final GA essay page . The skill I took from that is to be ready to use an opposing argument in your favor, which could make your essay look more powerful and most importantly would cause an increase in the success to persuade the reader. One of the other very important skills I've learnt is quoting other sources and citing them. Since I was in a French system high school, we weren't used to be that rigorous with citing, but after this class this aspect of my writing has strengthened so much. Submitting a working bibliography every week with the content we've learnt so far in the week really helped me to getting used to not only citing in MLA format, but it also helped me make sure I use references and examples form the primary and secondary sources I used to support my argument. I show this process of being more familiar with citing and using examples from texts here: One Step at a Time

I was certainly not expecting to be working in teams for a writing class project but hearing from different points of views was a very good learning tool for me in that class. Sharing each other's GA topics was really eye opening as well and made realize of many genre conventions that I haven't thought of as much. 

To be honest, I felt like my GA essay wasn't very useful to our IP prompt and thesis. We didn't use as much of any of our team members' GA ideas. The transition from GA to IP to me was not the best transition since the presentation of the information was a bit different than the presentation of the GA content. All the video essays were amazing and very interesting, but with the amount of them I was a bit confused and distracted by the ways it could be done. Maybe that was the reason why we decided we wanted to create something more unique and that would take more time and effort. 

When we were at a point where it was too late to back down from our idea, I felt like it would've been better to stick to the traditional way of video essay, because we went too deep into studying the characters while writing our script. But our teamwork was successful, and the video shows it. Although it may seem like our video was just acting, but we did include through the scenes the philosophical idea that the rules of Asimov divide between robots and humans, and the division being especially between essentialism and existentialism. In the video essay, we show how Pris ignores that there are rules to be followed and that Roy caused harm to anyone. Just like humans. They don't like to be given orders, and if they did something wrong, they could get away with it, and not anyone would confess to their wronging. Also, as seen in the script, we show how humans feel about robots through JF Sebastian and Tyrell.  Script and Narration Page