My Reflections

When I first walked into class, I had no idea what to expect from writing 39B. I
saw my friends struggling with the class last quarter and honestly I was little nervous
since there were so many other 39B courses I could have signed up for. However, after
the first week of class, I knew for sure that this was the right one. The individual
presentations we did were the best icebreakers and made it so I know the group of
students I have worked with all quarter. Such an open and diverse environment was
exactly what I needed to start off in my first college level writing course. Up until I took
this course I was not confident about my writing. In my past I learned about the absolute
structure of argumentative essays and the free structure of creative writing and poetry as
well as extensive research papers for a history or sociology class. Yet, I had never written
a single literature review or rhetorical analysis essay, so those assets I already had were
nearly useless for these projects. What ended up happening was that I broke a barrier.
When I broke that barrier, I finally started to see and know what I want in my writing.
The literature review was very difficult and I had a hard time connecting and analyzing
the dense scholarly articles, and it served as a warm up for my rhetorical analysis. I felt
that I knew exactly what I wanted to talk about in my writing for my RA essay, partly
because the topic is interesting and kept me thinking even when Im not writing, but
mainly because I had learned from my mistakes in my literature review. While I wrote
my RA I also prepared for my RIP seminar and this was the start of the hectic end to
every quarter. With such a heavy work load it was hard for me to keep on track and my
main motivations was the grade contract. The responsibility to complete every single
assignment on time took curiosity, engagement and persistence. When I say curiosity,
what I really mean is working hard, because how can someone work hard and produce
high quality work if they werent in any way curious? Here I am still alive writing a
reflection for the whole of the year. So far I am not displeased with my work and I am
definitely much more confident than the beginning of the quarter about communicating
through written words.
It was not until this class that I really saw writing as a medium of communication.
Up until now, I thought of communication only in terms of spoken words, especially
communication between two human who dont necessarily speak the same language. For
my whole life, I have dealt with my parents miscommunications by acting as a translator
between my native Japanese mother and American father. I now know that writing is just
as important as speaking when communicating with others. In fact I might say that they
are almost the same. If what you write doesnt sound good when you say it out loud,
maybe you should take a closer look and revise to improve. My first group presentation
was on the Victorian middle and lower class, and the assignment was to connect aspects
of the era to The Sign of Four, which we read for class. In our presentation we used slides
filled with text and minimal images to go alongside it. I know now that power point
presentations are most effective with minimal text, only what is needed, while we
verbally present our research and use lots of pictures to give the audience an image to go
along with our words. I was able to exercise this change in format for presentations in my
last presentation about cinematic conventions. My group was assigned composition in
film, so we gathered images that represent each aspect and talked to the class about how
each image was composed. However, this improvement did not happen right away. In our
first groups we gave two more presentations that each got better as we progressed
through the quarter. Our second presentation on the red headed league was also a great
success and included many of the aspects needed in a strong presentation. Up until this
point, I felt I had the responsibility to stay focused and on top of my work. In high school
I suffered from procrastination, which makes me relieved until the last minute when I
realize Im overloaded and get stressed out. With responsibility came engagement and
persistence. If Im not engaged, theres no way I could succeed in a class, and with out
persistence I wouldnt be able to responsibly finish and turn in my work on time or at all.
Most of all, with my presentations I learned the importance of metacognition- the ability
to reflect on my own learning. Without metacognition, I would never have been able to
see the flaws in my first presentation and fix those errors in format and style.
Just as I learned from my mistakes in the presentations, I learned from my
mistakes in my literature review essay. When I turned in my first draft, it definitely did
not reflect 100 percent of my effort. There were stupid errors everywhere and my ideas
were jumbled and incoherent. The literature essay definitely caught me off guard. Its not
like Dr. Haas didnt stress enough that the essay is about the viewpoints of the scholars; I
just didnt connect their ideas and even failed to introduce my sources properly. Writing
lengthy essays by synthesizing the ideas of scholars definitely is not my forte. Because
my literature review turned out worse than my rhetorical analysis, I decided to do my
paragraph analysis on the former. The weakest points of my paragraph that I revised is
that it is the first body paragraph of the essay so I formulated it as a background about
Doyle, how the detective genre came to be and how Sherlock Holmes fits into all of it.
Since it is mostly background, even though it relates to the thesis, it doesnt fully support
every aspect of it since the essay covers other points in the other body paragraphs.
However I was able to take it to a whole another level by looking at where the paragraph
lacked in the first draft.
Learning from the mistakes I made in my literature review, I thought out exactly
how I wanted to write my rhetorical analysis essay. For my RA, I knew to choose topics
that relate for the forum entries so that I dont have to scrap my work and start over
because the paragraph topics dont cohere. I knew that I wanted to write about the
implementation of the action adventure genre in the detective genre for the RA essay.
Since for this essay I knew exactly what I wanted to write about even before I wrote the
forum entries I was thoroughly prepared and the first draft was definitely much more
solid than the first draft of my literature review. I made sure to include every single point
necessary to formulate a powerful introduction, and created a logical sequence of ideas
for the body paragraphs and finally wrapped everything up neatly in a concise
conclusion. These are steps I took mainly by using metacognition to see how I lacked in
preparation in my first essay. I decided that I would take the RA essay to its final draft
because it is more solid, therefore in the time that I have, I will be able to take it to a
higher level than if I did a full revision of the literature review. I would say the greatest
weaknesses of my final draft of the RA essay are that I didnt refer to enough sources to
support my analysis. Compared to my literature review I included sparse sources in my
rhetorical analysis. Even though I was able to improve my RA by looking at the flaws of
the literature review, there proved to be problems unique to the RA essay. Clearly
metacognition was not the only thing on mind when I wrote and revised the essay. When
composing and revising, I felt I was utilizing persistence to keep my self working and
revising constantly, and to stay curious about the topics I wrote about so I could engage
and finish responsibly before the deadline. These are all of the habits of mind I learned on
my own. When working with my peers, I had a completely different experience.
Creativity, openness, and flexibility are the three required habits of mind when
working with a group. To work with someone else means that you should respect and
listen to his or her opinions and ideas, and to do this openness and flexibility are a must.
Furthermore, you must be creative and contribute your own ideas to the group. I learned
these processes throughout the quarter in the group presentations. Mostly flexibility went
to organizing a meeting time, and in most cases I assimilated to others schedules,
especially for the RIP seminar. I chose to be part of the play presentation group, so I
learned every aspect of the three required habits of mind. I especially learned to be
creative enough that I provide a steady stream of ideas for the group while being open
minded to others suggestions. There were more than a few instances when someone had
to give up their idea for the sake of the group. Without openness a group wouldnt
function because once a conflict is reached between the group members, there is no way
to resolve it without someone being open to others ideas. For the RIP seminar, I helped
come up with much of the plot and also wrote a detailed outline adding on the suicide red
herring. I also memorized my lines for the actual presentation to be as professional as
possible. From the other class, I learned that a presentation needs to engage the audience
in some way to keep their attention, they did this by making the class shudder in fear of
their expertly made horror films. Although I could clearly see aspects of the horror genre
that has inconsistencies compared to the detective genre. For example, a horror film often
ends without a complete explanation of how and what happened, whereas for the
detective, everything must be stated explicitly or else it is rejected as incomplete and an
ineffective story. Horror films dont necessarily have a set structure since there are so
many ways in which someone could make a horror film. I saw many different filming
techniques and completely different story structures ranging from the haunted house to
the serial killer murderer to the cursed spirits that take the lives of troubled individuals. I
saw in the other class that they probably went through all of the same habits of mind that
we did in our class with group work. Im sure they had to write a reflection about their
RIP just like we are now.
Now that it is the end, I can say for sure that everything we covered in the class
was to be expected and as a whole it has made me a better communicator. I learned that
becoming an efficient and successful communicator is the first step going into any
profession, and to achieve that I must master the habits of mind. If I dont think in the
correct way while learning, there is no way that I would be able acquire the level of
communication needed to achieve professional goals. Even if I were to pursue music as a
career, I can say for sure that if I dont know how to communicate in a sophisticated and
clear manner, the chances of my success will be slim. I know now that I must hone my
skills as a writer, speaker and presenter and aspire to greater feats reached not only
through skill in my field, but by becoming a communicator that can link together a
diverse pool of people from all different backgrounds. No matter how great a musician or
computer programmer I become, I must still be able to convey my thoughts in a
professional way. That is the first step to becoming a professional in any field.