Introduction

It’s already the end of sophomore year and how the time flew by! I initially began Writing 39C under the impression that I would be able to handle it as well as three other classes without too much issue. I quickly came to the realization, however, that this would prove to be a much more difficult task than expected. When I envisioned my classes for this quarter, I did not see writing 39C as a major difficulty point compared to the other classes. 

For the majority of this school year, I had taken it relatively easy with only three classes per fall and winter quarters. Signing up for an additional class this quarter didn’t seem like much of a problem. But I was nowhere near prepared for what Writing 39C had in store. Through the combination of long, extensive essays and in depth, focused research, I came to realize just how unprepared I truly was for this class. Before this class, I had never written papers quite this length or with anywhere near the amount of research and use of scholarly sources. With the instruction of Professor Chang, I have become somewhat more accustomed with the ins and outs of analyzing scholarly publications and feel much more confident with writing in this style myself. Thanks to Writing 39C, I am now much more capable of effectively analyzing and incorporating evidence into a persuasive paper.  

 Transferring What You Know

At the beginning of this quarter, I was, unknowingly, still a novice writer. Throughout high school, I had been taught relatively nothing about research. We had a bizarre system where projects (this included essays as well as tests) would have unofficial due dates at the end of the semester because there was no late penalty. This resulted in a difficult experience moving into college where that behavior would not get grades, but fails instead. I had spent somewhat of the first year relearning work habits as well as research efficiency. 

Then when Writing 39C came along, it opened up whole new areas of writing in which I could grow, ones I had never even thought of before. When Professor Chang first brought up the idea of using scholarly articles as evidence in our essays, I still had no idea what those were or even a clue that they existed! Thankfully Professor Chang gave us useful tips on reading scholarly sources such as how the thesis is always in the same place, the first and last two paragraphs are enough to gauge a topic, and that the abstract is a great summary. 

Moving into the quarter, we soon began diving into our topic refinement, and during so, we were introduced to tools which I had never used before such as CQ Researcher as well as specific search categories that would lead to different results. The class taught us well how to use these tools over the quarter. We were given many library tutorials and even an entire book dedicated to teaching us how to do a proper search and formulate an essay. CQ Researcher ended up being a very helpful tool and easy to use tool which allowed me to quickly find topics in any category I could search for. Each article on CQ Researcher also contained a plethora of resources which were very helpful and convenient.

Rosenkrantz 'article contains a great example of how useful CQ Researcher is as a base for resources. The figure above is only a small portion of the extensive list of resources used in her article, with many of those sources containing information on a refined topic relevant to the base article. Using these is a great way that I learned to find and refine my topic during the initial Contexts Project topic honing phase.

Using what I had learned about scholarly resources and search terms, I have been able to more effectively recognize and analyze scholarly resources for my other classes. This quarter, for an Urban Planning class we were assigned to write an essay using provided sources about a variety of topics. Thanks to Writing 39C, I was able to quickly discern which of the resources were scholarly (peer reviewed and written by experts in a specific field) and which were popular (not necessarily peer reviewed and written for the general public). I was also able to quickly and efficiently figure out which of the scholarly sources would be useful to me and create a mental summary of each of them. This definitely helped me be more efficient during the research portion of that project and it was thanks to my time in Writing 39C.

Your Composing Process

Throughout Writing 39C, my research strategies have changed quite a lot. I have always had difficulty doing research. On past assignments, research would usually be my biggest weakness, holding back my ability to do an effective essay. Before the class, I would usually look for multiple sources on the web and might have even used Wikipedia if my class allowed it. I would usually go by title and read through far too much of each article before deciding whether I wanted to use it or not as evidence to back up my argument. 

Starting with the contexts project, I began to learn that there were better ways to find resources than a google search and the first few weeks gave me tools that I could utilize to quickly find said resources. Thankfully, the process necessary to refine a topic was of utmost importance for the contexts project. Finding new resources and analyzing the main points of each one led me, one by one, to creating a better and more concise topic of my own.

This was one of the biggest areas of growth I had throughout the quarter. Before this class, I would find a topic (usually a broad one at that) and would proceed to find resources that worked to support that topic, never changing or rethinking my thesis. For the contexts project, during research, I came across many scholarly and non-scholarly articles that would introduce me to different and new ideas. Because of this, my thesis, and in turn the rest of my paper, was constantly changing. The above figures are an example of an update I made to the thesis of the contexts project. Every once in a while I would come across an article that contained points and new information that I had not thought of before and this would influence my paper significantly. I believe the change in figure 2 was actually due to the introduction of the terms vertical and horizontal competition, which further refined my topic and argument. From this, I learned that it is important to be flexible with your paper and to let the conclusion be guided by evidence and not the other way around. It is also helpful because an evidence guided paper avoids cherry picking due to the fact that the evidence comes first before the conclusion. 

Rhetoric, Argumentation, & Multimodal Communication

I found out a key skill through the Advocacy Project that I will probably always use in future persuasive style essays. The key thing I learned is the importance of comparison to move an argument. I have, in the past, dabbled in using counterclaims to prove a point in essays. The advocacy project, on the other hand, put that to a whole new level. In it, we were prompted to find a possible solution which could help deal with the issue we chose for the contexts project. I believed that this would be the entire project, finding a good solution and explaining why it’s good. I was, to say the least, only half right. The second part of the prompt asked us to choose at least one other possible advocacy effort and explain why we would choose one over the other.

I ended up choosing three advocacy efforts to focus on, each with their own merits. Through research, I chose the one I believed would be best and spent almost half of the essay explaining why it was. The other half, however, was devoted to explaining the other two proposals and comparing and contrasting them to the proposal I had chosen. This allowed my essay to have an argumentative factor that none of my previous essays have had. It gave me the ability to show not just the strengths and weaknesses of my proposal, but also why those strengths lead me to my decision by comparing them to the strengths of the other proposals. It also gave me an easy source of contrast. By showing how the other proposals’ issues interfere with the advocacy’s objective, it highlighted the strengths of the proposal I chose and it reinforced why my proposal would be the best solution to the issue.

I thought that the use of such an expansive and detailed comparison to other advocacy efforts was very helpful and increased both the credibility and effectiveness of my argument by a significant measure. I also very much enjoy finding big holes in people’s arguments. So when half of the project was pretty much doing that to official advocacy proposals I was all in!

Conclusion

Throughout Writing 39C, I learned a lot about writing techniques, many of which have carried over to other classes and are already helping me with being a more efficient researcher, a skill that I have always had trouble with. Thanks to the past quarter, I have learned to be a much better writer and a much more efficient researcher and scholar. I feel as though I have gathered enough skills and techniques to help guide me through my future writing endeavors. A final thanks to Professor Chang who has helped me get through this quarter and become a far better writer!