Amavizca 1 Rebecca Amavizca Lynda Haas Writing 37 15 March 2014 Final Reflection Essay Being a part of Writing 37 with

Professor Haas has been an enriching experience. I still recall in first quarter meeting a student that recommended her class, and I was encouraged to enroll. Looking back now, I am very glad to have been part of this particular writing course at UC Irvine for several reasons. The topics I learned in class instilled in me several habits of mind. Such habits include curiosity, openness, engagement, creativity, persistence, responsibility, flexibility, and metacognition. My curiosity peaked at the start of the class as I desired to learn how to write better academic essays. As I reflect back on the weeks in Writing 37, I realize that I have learned how to write better, how to analyze genre, and how to collaborate well. I have also learned how to improve my grammar by using an online program called Connect, and how to participate and present in our class Rhetoric in Practice seminar. Specifically, one of the topics I learned from this course strengthened my ability in writing a textual analysis. After becoming familiar with the Sherlock Holmes and mystery fiction theme, I was open to growing and learning how to make a deeper meaning of the texts. To do this, I had to be creative and figure out what topic I wanted to flesh out and expose insight to. This process took me the longest because I personally need to be confident about what Im writing about in order to write well. Once I knew what I wanted to write about, I could attempt

Amavizca 2 to write a thesis. I made many mistakes while trying to write a thesis, however, with help from my professor and peers, I learned from how to write a solid and clear thesis that expanded on the topics I wanted to analyze and give meaning to. In class I also learned that either one or two passages are needed to analyze. I learned that when writing a textual analysis essay, it is important to meticulously search through the texts and do close reading to develop main ideas. Moreover, when it came to writing my essays, writing came easier and better when I outlined these things and then dug deeper during the analysis part to make a new observation about the authors meaning of the text. Learning how to analyze genre helped me in the process of writing my Conan Doyle textual analysis essay. I also discovered that analyzing genre was a novel approach to writing a textual analysis paper. When analyzing genre, I realized that no matter what I reveal from a passage, I have to say that it contributes to the genre it belongs to, and in the classs case, to the mystery genre. I have to include the definition of the mystery genre and the conventions that make up the stories. In class, I learned to analyze the mystery genre through the conventions established in Conan Doyles 19th century texts. In both of my essays, I used the convention of Conan Doyles police detective character Athelney Jones and Lestrade. After writing the analysis, I recognized the significance of observing at a text with a perspective focused on its particular genre. Being aware of this allowed me to better understand how Conan Doyles genre conventions influenced an entire category of fiction that developed and matured from a classical stage to a revisionist stage. Thus, in future writing and reading I will begin by understanding the genre background of the text in order to fully be aware of the genre category and distinguish how it has shaped the text itself. Throughout the course, I have learned to write two textual analysis essays: a genre essay focused on literary analysis and a modern-day text essay focused on cinematic analysis. From

Amavizca 3 the two, I have fully revised the modern-day text essay. The reason I chose to revise this particular essay is because I invested more time and interest while developing the essay. I also enjoyed writing more about my modern-day text BBC Sherlock. I spent an entire afternoon researching film terms and planning a second draft revision because my first draft was really weak and had little to no film analysis. It took a lot of persistence to sustain enough interest in finishing the second draft of my modern-day essay. But other than that, writing the Modern-day text rhetorical analysis increased my creativity because it forced me to approach an analysis differentlyI had to choose one scene from an entire television series and then analyze that scene cinematically rather than literarily which is not what Im accustomed to. I had to present novel ideas by learning and utilizing cinematic terms such as editing, framing, lighting, and point of view. One of the greatest strengths of my modern-day text essay is probably the introduction. I think it is written clearly and is a strong opening to my essay. Another would be the many sources I used which added to my credibility as a writer and made me sound like an expert. My solid analysis is an additional strength in my modern-day text. I chose a short and very specific scene to analyze from episode 2 series 2 in BBC Sherlock and also researched as many film techniques as I could that applied to the scene. After carefully watching and observing my particular scene continuous times, I could successfully develop connections from the scene to the original Conan Doyle stories. However, one of the weaknesses of my final draft is my conclusion. I had an especially difficult time revising my conclusion because I had to come up with how BBC Sherlock is a revisionist text and how it ultimately differs from Conan Doyles original texts even though the two have the similar police detective character conventions. If I had more time to work on this essay Id definitely prioritize writing a stronger conclusion and make claims about the difference in Victorian audiences to 21 st century audiences. On the other

Amavizca 4 hand, I did not fully revise the Conan Doyle Essay; however, I chose to fully revise the second body paragraph. I chose this particular paragraph because it was solid but could be better if the analysis part was further developed. After persistently having revised this body paragraph, the analysis is greatly improved. The paragraph has a stronger and deeper meaning to the genre convention of Conan Doyles police detective Jones. Ultimately, my writing has progressively advanced by writing and rewriting in this course. Another valuable learning experience in Writing 37 has been collaboration. Since the beginning of the class, I was placed in a group with four other talented students: Sue Sullivan, Korayma Arriaga, Brenda Sanchez, and Kurtis Patrick Wragg. Our very first collaborative effort in week two was definitely an interesting and enlightening experience. Having good communication and grouping up out of class worked well for our collaboration. After presenting about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I thought our team had actually done well for a first attempt. We found ourselves challenged by the high expectations we had difficulty reaching. We found that our group needed improvement in having correct facts and interacting with our audience so that our presentation was not just a lecture. However, after that first collaborative experience, I recall a sense of openness and curiousness began to develop in me. At that point, teaching a class and lecturing in front of an audience was something I had done before, but that first presentation taught me that in a new environment, expectations are different. As a result of these new challenges, I became more flexible and thus willing to adapt to more difficult situations. Since our first collaboration, getting to work with my gifted teammates has encouraged me in other presentations to thinking differently about how to collaborate and be creative. All five of us met out of class every time we had a presentation or group project due, and although at times it took us hours to complete a simple task, we grew together and learned to corroborate by sharing our

Amavizca 5 ideas. The group project that required a lot of persistence was our modern-day text presentation. The five of us spent around four hours simply getting our ideas together and then splitting the work. This presentation was very tedious; however, Bob Haas congratulated us on how well we sounded like experts of our text and how much we had improved since the first presentation. This was because each group member maintained interest and effort in improving his or her ability to present well as an individual and as a group. Throughout the quarter, I actively engaged in learning the Connect Grammar and Language assignments. While some lessons I had previously knowledge of and came easy, other lessons were challenging and tough. Ive seen the most growth in lessons covering pronouns, pronoun-antecedent agreement, subject-verb agreement, and modifiers. For the pronounantecedent module, 92 percent of the time I was conscious of the fact that I knew that answer and only 8 percent of the time I thought I knew the answer but in fact did not. However, for the pronoun module, I scored a 100 percent. Although I struggled in some parts of subject-verb agreement, overall I improved since the time I was introduced to the rule in my senior year of high school. Lastly, I did exceptionally well on dangling and misplaced modifiers. However, there were some modules I struggled with. One challenging module was the generating ideas lesson which took me almost four hours to complete because it was difficult and because it was glitched. Many of the topics covered were unfamiliar to me so although it took me a while to take in all the information, I was able to score high on the aware that you knew the answer category. Another lesson I struggled with was critical reading: identifying claims and evidence. Twenty-five percent of the time I thought I knew the answer but I really didnt. I will continue to use Connect to work on this particular lesson because it is a topic that is necessary to master in order to become a better reader and writer. All in all, using Connect significantly strengthened

Amavizca 6 my grammar and ultimately my writing abilities. Although the work can be tedious, it was worth taking the time because the results proved helpful when writing my essays during the quarter. These grammar rules are unavoidable when writing, so it is important that I continue to learn, practice, and reflect on the rules so that they are instilled in my writing. When I enter into Writing 39C, my abilities dealing with grammar and language will be further challenged, so it is crucial that I continue to practice these lessons. The online program was a useful tool for reviewing and mastering topics that I had difficulty with. Over all, it was an effective program that I can use in the future for additional training. I played two roles and contributed in several ways for the RIP Seminar. In class with Bob, I openly shot out ideas that could be covered in our introduction. Then I suggested that the class should divide into their modern-day text groups and come up with ideas for the Murder Mystery skit. On a Google doc, I wrote out an idea which was acting out a mystery of the murder of Peter the Anteater after a basketball game. The class came up with a different idea, but I contributed in it as well. For the introduction part of the Seminar, I was in charge of presenting. I was the speaker on topics about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and how he modeled Sherlock Holmes after his college professor Joseph Bell and his sidekick Dr. John Watson after himself. After expanding on that, I was also responsible for presenting my groups modern-day revisionist text BBC Sherlock. I was also in charge of writing out Scene 8 for the Murder Mystery script with Sue. We established a solid idea for how the case would be concluded. Lastly, I was part of the stage crew group that helped move around furniture for the scenes and props for dress rehearsal and for the night of the presentation. Overall, our class RIP presentation went well. I really enjoyed the whole experience. Our class made it even more remarkable. One of the things I thought went really well was the

Amavizca 7 conciseness and straightforwardness of our presentation. Our part presented enough information for the opposite class to get an idea of our classs Sherlock Holmes and mystery genre theme in a brief 45 minutes. Because we only lectured for 15 minutes, the audience maintained focus because we didnt present for an excessive amount of time. Another thing that went well was that our presentation was entertaining. Our PowerPoint scarcely had any writing and consisted of mostly images which really encouraged listeners and provided visual appeal to our entire presentation. Our skit also added some humor and liveliness that made the presentation fun and enjoyable. Lastly, I just really liked the energetic vibe our class gave out. Our positivity and strong effort made our class seem like we did what we had to do, but that we had a good time doing it. The other classs presentation was good as well. The fact that their class theme was horror really stood out to me. Another thing was the big contrast between their approaches of the presentation to that of our classs. It didnt seem like a collective class presentation, but rather multiple presentations that covered one topic in the horror theme with group members focused only on their own presentation. One thing I thought went really well was the presenters level of expertise. For the most part, each presenter was confident about what they spoke which personally captured my attention to their complex lesson. Another thing I liked was that they were engaging. They played multiple videos to accompany their lecture that were interesting and some even thrilling. Lastly, several presenters didnt talk monotone and were even humorous at times. It was nice to have the presenters act themselves while still presenting formally. They way most of them talked was not boring or dull. They even made some funny references and said silly things that made me laugh and pay attention. Writing this reflection essay helped me use metacognition: the ability to reflect on my own learning. This includes the most valuable things that this course taught me. Writing 37 has

Amavizca 8 showed me how to compose formal essays; specifically, literary and rhetorical analysis which has been a beneficial learning experience because I will need strong writing skills after finishing this class and even further during my undergraduate career. Another important lesson I learned was collaborating with a small group of individuals. I have had prior experience with collaborating; however, this class has instilled flexibility and responsibility in an entirely different way for me. Working in a small group during the entire quarter taught me to always be responsible for the assignments or roles I am in charge of while helping my members with theirs. Working with others is something I will continue to do and so I need to keep it in practice, especially because every group and environment is different. Thus, I will continue collaborating with others as circumstances and environments demand. This includes in my future classes and career. Yet another important lesson learned as a result of this class has been presenting in front of an audience. I still get nervous when speaking publically; however, because of the frequent presentation assignments since week one in class, I have definitely improved. Presenting has challenged me to step out of my comfort zone and to effectively be interactive with an audience. This is crucial in my future in college in general but especially for my future career. Since I am working towards a psychology degree and will one day be a therapist, it is valuable to practice how to socially talk and listen to others while also being responsive. I plan to continue strengthening my capacity to write, collaborate, and present because each are fundamental in school and in the workforce. As I endeavor onto the next writing course, I will apply the various lessons I have learned in Professor Haass Writing 37 course to press forward and improve.