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Grace Chang
Dr. Haas
Writing 37
4 March 2015
Reflection Essay
Hatred. Fear. Excuse. These three words describe my feeling towards writing. I despised
myself for comparing my lack of writing skills to my friends, many who were gifted writers. In
hindsight, my low self-esteem and hatred for writing were really fear in disguise. I was afraid to
try; I was afraid to compete with people who were far greater than I was. So I thought, why try?
Hence, I began to distance myself from anything that associated with literature, analysis, or
critical thinking. However, Writing 37 has changed my view of the subject. Although I am not
big fan of writing, still, through our theme of animals I was able to be more open about writing
than I ever was in the past. This class exposed me to different aspects of writing and literature
and how it can be used to communicate with others.
Our first big assignment was creating a presentation concerning animals. My group, the
Pennies, researched about the breeding dogs for personal value. We discussed the advantage and
disadvantage of dog breeding and the evolution of dog. This presentation was our first instance
collaborating with each other. Through this assignment, I once again realized the importance of
communicating with each member of the group and the gravity of responsibility each members
part. This project was very easy for me to focus because my worries of owning a purebred
Golden Retriever motivated me to be curious and therefore educated myself of the possible
genetic issues of purebreds in the future. Through countless hours of research, I learned that
purebred dogs have a higher chance of hip dysplasia and possibly an alteration in appearance. In

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W.E. Masons book Dogs of All Nation, compared the physical appearance of purebred dogs
from a hundred years ago and their current image. Many of the breeds had a significant change in
not only its physical features but also were degraded in health. While I received great
information about owning a purebred, I also felt convicted. I am a big advocate of adopting
animals from shelters, but I purchased my dog from a breeder and I didnt realize this until I read
an article for this project. PETA stated, All breeders fuel the animal overpopulation crisis, and
every time someone purchases a puppy or a kitten instead of adopting from an animal shelter,
homeless animals lose their chance of finding a home an will be euthanized. My heart sank as
I read this sentence. I felt so ashamed that my selfishness and desires destroyed a chance for an
animal to get a home.
After our presentation, we transitioned into our first writing assignment, which was the
Critical Reading Response Assignment (Literature Review). The purpose of a literature review is
to converse what other scholars and experts have already discussed about the topic. I wrote my
paper on the fall of elephants and the rise of ivory. I had the most trouble writing this essay than
the Rhetorical Analysis, because I didnt really understand what it meant by putting the scholars
into a conversation. I thought that conversation meant merely listing out the facts from the
sources and the more I thought about, the more confused I became. The literature review was
also difficult to write because I was no longer writing in the format I learned in high school. It
was hard trying to break from the structural writing I was taught by my entire life. However, the
peer review process helped me be persistent in trying to understanding how to write the literature
review and see my paper from a different perspective. As I read other peoples essay, I
understood better of how I was suppose to go about the paper. I chose to revise my second body
paragraph, In 1979, 1.3 million African elephants settled all over Africa, but a decade later, the

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elephant population decreased to about 600,000 it is ultimately the humans decision that
determines the survival of the African elephants, because it did not correlate with my new thesis
and it lacked enormously in terms of conversing with my sources. Also, as one of my beginning
paragraphs, I wanted to start strong. During my revision process, I learned what it meant to have
a conversation with my sources and was able to portray that in my essay.
Our third assignment was to create a Public Service Announcement (PSA). My group,
The Cool Kids, discussed about pet adoption and how it is beneficial to both the pet and adopter.
The point of creating a PSA was to teach us how to apply Aristotelian rhetorical appeals - ethos,
logos and pathos for our upcoming essay, the Rhetorical Analysis. While we were creating PSA
video, we believed that we proportionately applied the three appeals, however, according to the
audience, the video displayed more of pathos than the other appeals. The audiences criticism
allowed us to be flexible in meeting the expectations of equally providing the appeals and
accepting the situation that there are many loose-ends to our video. Not only did we have to
balance out the appeals, but also had to rethink what purpose the video is suppose to display. As
a co-creator of the video, I was confused if we were promoting to support no-kill shelters or to
adopt pets. Nonetheless, I believe that through the second opinion from the audience, we were
able to create a more effective and improved PSA.
The last major writing assignment was the Rhetorical Analysis (RA) essay. The purpose
of writing an RA is to analyze how the Aristotelian rhetorical appeals persuade the audience in a
certain way. I decided to analyze the Gabriela Cowperthwaites Blackfish, a documentary about
orcas in captivity. I first decided to discuss how the film used ethos and pathos to appeal the Sea
Worlds wrongdoings of keeping orcas captive, but as I wrote my analysis, I was puzzled
between the definition logos and ethos because there were many areas. Some instance could have

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been labeled either logos or ethos; therefore, to avoid further confusion, I decided to use
examples that were clearly logos. I revised my first body paragraph, One of the emotional
themes showed in the documentary is the separation of mother and child. In the late 1970s, a
baby orca was helplessly separated from its family it does not allow humans to capture and
destroy the animals identities because it lacked a lot of specificity and analysis. I received from
both the instructor and my peers that I had more of a summary than an analysis. I slowly read the
paper and elaborated more on the details by explaining how certain appeals convey to the
audience.
I believe that one the most important and beneficial activity we have done was the peer
reviews. By peer reviewing other students essays, it not only helped them improve on their
essays, but also enrich my papers through thinking more critically. By reading other papers, it
engaged me to think outside the box and examine the essay from a different perspective. This
helped me analyze my essays through a wider lens and be more objective towards it. In the
beginning, I considered the connect assignments to be tedious and unnecessary, but I slowly
realized that it helped me not only review but also improve on certain lessons like, subject-verb
agreement and modifiers. The blogs was one way of forcing myself to be on top of my
assignments and reading the texts carefully, because many of the blogs required me to refer back
to specific quotes or details. Also, blogs about our revision strategy allowed me to think more in
depth of the issues I had with my essays and how I can improve them. Creating the ePortfolio
really tested the extent of my creativity. I wanted my ePortfolio to be unique and interesting to
future Writing 37 students, so it made me meditate on how I can accomplish that. I believe that
grasping the audiences interest in the most important because that leads them to further explore
my creation.

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Writing 37 was the first writing class I enjoyed. Not only did the theme of animals kept
me persistent in coming to class, but also Dr. Haass feedback on all of our assignments was very
encouraging for me to do better. I think the main reason why I really appreciated this class
because I felt, for the first time, that someone cared about my writing and genuinely wanted to
help me improve. The metacognition for this class was that it reminded me how time
management is essential especially for writing a paper. Writing requires a lot of thinking and
time to produce a masterpiece. Likewise, time and thinking are significant in my life and my
future classes.