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David Zapata
Professor Haas
Writing 39C
2 June 2015
Reflection Essay
When I began my studies at UCI, I knew that writing was one of my weaker skills.
After taking the analytical writing placement exam, I was placed into Writing 37. That
began my journey in the Writing 39 series. With lots of persistence, I have finally
completed the lower division writing sequence at UCI, and I feel like my writing skills
have improved greatly since I entered UCI. This course in particular, Writing 39C,
improved my ability to communicate and use rhetoric through its focus on research,
argument, and the use of social media as a tool for communication. These skills were
honed through the various assignments and activities the class consisted of; including
collaborative group work, the discovery and review of scholarly sources in the Historical
Conventions Project, the launch of a social media campaign, the formation of a problem
and a proposed solution in the Advocacy Project, various Connect assignments that
improved technical writing skills, and weekly blog posts that improved metacognition.
Collaborative group work is one of the largest and most important aspects of
Writing 39C. Our class integrated group work in every class meeting, which created a
sense of engagement in the class each time we got together. Every day we would form
a circle with our chairs and collaborate on the specific task of the day. These
collaborations made the class more interactive and I felt that my learning was more
involved. For example, our class was assigned to skim read an article on peer review

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and analyze the article within our groups. With the discussion, I learned about certain
aspects that were detailed in the article from my group mates that I missed in my first
read through. Another aspect of group work in the class was presentations. The two
major presentations in our class were the Animal Minds presentation and the overview
of our social media project. When working on these projects, I had to be responsible to
complete my portion of the presentation and make sure that my part was equal in
weight as the others. Another major aspect of collaborative work in the class was the
use of peer review. I learned that not only receiving feedback from my peers was helpful
to my writing, but giving out feedback also improved my writing as I got to improve my
critical reading skills in pointing out the errors in other essays, which is a skill that
improved my writing as a whole.
While collaborative group work improved my communication and writing skills,
the Historical Conventions Project improved my research skills. The path to finding a
research topic was long and difficult. Openness was a necessary skill for me as I had to
consider various types of research topics to use for my HCP. I was very indecisive on
my research topic, but the Animal Minds presentations influenced my decision to
research on animal cognition and behavior, as that specific presentation was the most
interesting to me. My curiosity on the field of animal cognition and behavior led me to
the specific topic of cognitive and behavioral disorders in rats, mice, and dogs for my
HCP. I used various resources to find the sources I needed for my essay, including the
library databases and the search engine Google Scholar. After finding a few relevant
sources, I created an annotated bibliography for each of them that gave a brief overview
of the source and how useful each source could be to my essay. These annotated

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bibliographies are displayed on my online portfolio, and show my research path to
creating my HCP. For the actual essay, I synthesized the ideas each of my source had
into one central focus: that the study of animal disorders are useful as models for
human disorders, specifically anxiety and brain aging. Overall, this essay improved my
ability to discover research and integrate evidence into an overarching structure.
The conclusion of my Historical Conventions Project set up a moral question on
the ethics of lab research, which led to a social media project that focused on animal
experimentation. This social media project was a collaborative effort, and our group had
to work together to create a campaign advocating a cause. Our specific campaign
focused on animal experimentation, specifically animal cosmetic testing. Our group had
to use creativity to find out which of our various approaches were most effective in
launching our campaign. We decided to follow a seven day framework in which each
day we would focus on a specific activity to advance our campaign. As our campaign
progressed, I began to see how powerful social media can be for the spread of
information and for rallying followers to a cause. One example of this was the use of our
Twitter, where simply following people and retweeting their posts caused a large amount
of followers to accumulate. I also learned that to communicate effectively with a specific
audience, the UCI audience in particular, we had to figure out ways to make our
campaign target the UCI students effectively. We did this by personally standing on
campus with a poster, encouraging students to support cruelty free products and visit
our website as well as encouraging them to download an app that would help them do
support our cause. The social media project improved my communication skills by

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showing me how to effectively spread a message and encourage participation to a
specific audience, establishing social media as a powerful communication tool.
The social media campaign served as an introduction to the Advocacy Project, as
the primary purpose of our campaign was to spread awareness to our problem. The
Advocacy Project integrated the research of the Historical Conventions Project into a
larger essay that defined a problem based on the HCP research and advocated a
solution to that problem. Narrowing down the problem was a difficult task, as the frame
for the problem had to be very small. With the help of more annotated sources, I was
able to focus my problem on the suffering of animals in experiments designed for
scientific studies. The solution I proposed for this problem had both a large and small
scale to it, with the large scale focusing on a policy proposal and the small scale
involving social media. Coming up with these solutions showed my understanding of
argumentation and in a different manner than the social media project. While the social
media project was targeted towards UCI students, my essay had a scholarly audience,
which meant I had to use hard evidence to support my claims and not just form
meaningless opinions. Overall, the Advocacy Project improved my ability to create an
argument by making me create a solution to problem with the use of research to back
my claims.
While the major projects in the course aimed to improve my research and
argument skills, the Connect assignments and the weekly blog posts aimed to improve
my technical writing skills. The Connect assignments that I worked on throughout the
quarter focused on improving my writing mechanics. Each of these assignments
provided a report that detailed my results from completing the assignment. These

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reports were helpful because they displayed my strengths and weaknesses, which I
could use to improve my writing overall. For example, the self assessment reports
displayed colored columns of percentages that were helpful in evaluating my skill level
of the material tested as well as my confidence level of the knowledge I knew. The
weekly blog posts aimed at using metacognition, as each week I would reflect on the
work I accomplished and understand how to improve myself by looking back at my
mistakes. Overall, the Connect assignments and blog posts were just as helpful in
improving my writing skills as the major projects because they focused on the technical
areas that are used in all of my writing assignments.
The skills that I gained in Writing 39C will affect me for the rest of my scholarly
career. I will not just leave this class and forget everything I learned, I plan to use my
rhetoric and communication skills in future classes and careers. For example, the
knowledge and skills I learned in this class could be transferred to upper division writing
courses such as ENGR 190W, which focuses on communications in the professional
world of engineering, as well as the many Biology labs that require intensive writing
skills. I have learned a lot in this class and I hope to make the most of these acquired
skills in the future to improve society and make an impact on the world.