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Andrew Kwok
Dr. Lynda Haas
Writing 39B
2 June 2014
Reflection Essay
Thomas Edison famously said that genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine
percent perspiration. I started this class knowing writing was not my strong suit. English for me
is one of those subjects that I had no problem taking, and occasionally even excelled in, but
there was no passion in it. Growing up I never really liked English class, and even to this day I
still find a personal discomfort with writing essays and papers. While I cannot say that Writing
39B has completely changed my mind about the subject, I will say that I have a renewed respect
and admiration for creating an eloquent and well-versed essay it is almost like playing a song
perfectly on the guitar or completing an artwork that one can be proud of. It certainly is not
easy, but the reward is well worth the dedication and effort. I have learned quite a bit in this
class, not only about writing a coherent and structured essay but also about habits of mind,
which include curiosity, openness, engagement, creativity, persistence, responsibility, flexibility,
and metacognition.
When I picked Writing 39B, I did not really know what to expect. I knew that I was no
fan of writing academically, but when I found out that our topic was Sherlock Holmes, my
curiosity was immediately piqued. Although I had little knowledge about him besides the
superficial, I was more interested having heard the topic than I was previously. In terms of
writing academic essays and revising them, I believe the most important lesson I can draw from
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them is that the thesis is the most important sentence in the entire essay. It is the one sentence
that the essay draws its focus from, and therefore it has to be highly specific and descriptive. If
it is not highly concentrated on a particular topic or theme, then the rest of the essay loses
focus and the reader has a hard time understanding what exactly the author intends to say. For
the literature review, for example, my challenge was convincing myself that the essay was not
about what I thought about Sherlock Holmes and how the detective genre came about, but
what published scholars thought about the topic. I had been accustomed to writing essays
about my own analysis for so long that it was disorientating to write about what others
thought, even though the scholars have a far better understanding about the genre than I do.
This caused me to work on metacognition, as I had to adapt and realize that not every essay is
going to be written the exact same way, helping me become a better writer. One of the things
that helped me while writing the essay was by starting with the thesis once I had a thesis I
was proud of, the rest of the topic sentences and paragraphs followed suit. Another thing that
was difficult about the literature review was simply learning to be engaged in the topic, since I
had no prior experience to the topic and I was struggling to be involved. One way I convinced
myself was to realize that, in all things, there will be fun activities and tedious activities, and it is
my job to reduce the latter by changing my own attitude about the subject. The same is true for
the rhetorical analysis paper. Although I had written similar papers in the past, this was
probably the first time I had written one with source texts that were not actually on paper. The
RA was a little easier to write because of that, since it was not difficult to adapt my prior
knowledge to the new texts, but again the most important part was writing a strong thesis.
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The essay I ended up fully revising is the rhetorical analysis, as I believe that I have a
stronger grasp on the concept and, to be frank, it is a more interesting topic so I do not feel like
it is a chore to edit and revise. I think the best part of my essay is that I successfully define both
the action adventure and the detective genre, and explain how they relate to one another in
the 21
st
century. Even though on the surface these two genres seem like polar opposites, there
are actually a handful of similarities between them. One weakness of the essay, though, is that
the chase scene I picked to illustrate how the detective genre and the action-adventure genre
have been successfully integrated is a bit long, so it seems like much of the paragraph is
summary. If there was more time to revise, I might have even chose a different scene
altogether. As it stands, though, I think the essay is decent. The paragraphs and sentences
logically flow from one into another, and the reader knows what I am conveying. I chose to
revise only a single paragraph for the Literature Review because I do not feel like I could make
an entire cohesive essay as strong as the RA in the time allotted. I ended up choosing a body
paragraph regarding the development of the detective novel and reasons for its sudden
explosion in popularity during the Victorian Era, because it is one of the stronger paragraphs in
the essay and it felt most natural to revise it. Overall, the revisions I made were not major but
mostly for clarification and making it flow better. The first draft did not really synthesis the
sources too well either, so the revision is a lot better in that regard.
During this second week of class, our group worked on a presentation to help the rest of
the class learn more about medicine and science in the Victorian era, especially its limitations.
For example, we found out that knowledge of diseases and how to treat them were pretty
crude and most doctors of the time did not really know what was going on. Our group was
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pretty motivated so collaborating kind of came naturally to us, and Google Drive turned out to
be very effective in helping us organize as well. There were a few challenges we ran into, one of
which was our difficulty slimming down our presentation, since we had a lot of text and actually
went over time. I feel like once I finished my part of the presentation, I basically left my group
mates to do their portion of the work, with the occasional word of advice here and there. It
would probably have worked out better if I was actively involved, not just worried about my
part. Nevertheless, I feel that we were very effective as a whole in terms of projecting our
voices and speaking clearly and slowly. Peer reviews were also tough because not everyone was
on the same page in terms of actively participating. Not everyone was one-hundred percent
dedicated to helping one another write a cohesive, coherent essay, and it really affected me
since I had a rougher idea of what was good and bad about my essays. Ultimately, I had to learn
to do my best job and hope that everyone else would too.
For the Seminar, I was in charge of introducing the video as well as producing the video,
the latter being done ahead of time. I basically said a short summary about what the video was
about, which was to inform the audience about what Sherlock Holmes is and how it has
changed or stayed the same in the 21st century. The video used clips from both the BBC TV
show as well as the two Guy Ritchie films. I mentioned in the beginning, before the video
started, that the video would (unfortunately) be more informative than entertaining, since the
other class made short horror films - a tough act to follow. The seminar certainly helped reveal
and build skills I did not know I had - video editing, for example. I was familiar with the concept,
but I had not really done it in some time so I was pretty rusty at it, and the experience I had
with it was minimal at best. It was a bit of a challenge having to relearn video editing software,
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as well as timing all the scenes and putting them together in a cohesive and lining up all the
audio files that Benjeet and Jonathan sent me. Overall, I would not say video editing is tough,
but I will say that it is tedious. For example, I had to get creative when I realized I could not
have two audio tracks, such as both music and narration, on at the same time. To combat this, I
had to render the video twice, once with narration and once with music. I spent pretty much all
of the long weekend working on it, which definitely helped me focus on persistence. There
were times when my computer was simply overloaded and I would have to wait a few minutes
for the scene to render, which certainly tested my patience. The video editing time also helped
to develop my flexibility, since I had to work with my fellow video editor, Kingsley, as well as the
narrators Ben and Jon, to send revised videos or audio clips. Lastly, responsibility is something
that I definitely worked on - I take full responsibility for the video not turning out the way it was
supposed to. On my home computer, the sound was more than loud enough, but in the
seminar room the voices were barely audible. I should have taken into consideration the fact
that I am much closer to the speakers than the class would have been, and therefore the video
kind of fell flat. Thus, the video was not as strong as it should have been, and I think it was a
real detriment to educating the other class. Still, I should not be so hard on myself, and I guess
the only thing I can do now is take these three Habits of Mind into account for the next time
around.
Writing 39B has had far reaching implications for my career as a student here at UCI. In
most of my other classes, such as calculus and physics, I am searching for an answer that is
known by the professor and there is an expected method to reach that answer. In this class,
however, the path is more varied and numerous, and there is not necessarily one path either. I
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have learned that diligence and hard work far outstrip sheer mental capacity in terms of being
proficient at something. While it is not the easiest class, 39B, perhaps most importantly, has
opened my mind to the world of Sherlock Holmes which I had previously ignored and
showed me how not only to see, but also observe my world, and be highly critical of the things
surrounding me.