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Bryan Diaz

Professor Greg McClure

Writing 39B

22 March 2018

Final Reflection Essay

Going through Writing 39B was definitely challenging, but the course also provided me

with a beneficial learning experience that has enabled me to grow as a writer. All those nights

staying up late writing and the countless hours spent on drafting and revising were some of the

most stressful times for me this quarter, but they proved to be beneficial in the end. Before taking

this course, I never considered myself a strong writer nor did I have any confidence in my

abilities as a writer. Because of this, I disliked writing and never really tried to better my skills

since I thought that there would be no difference. Going into Writing 39B I didn’t have much

hope that anything would change and even believed that it was possible that I might not pass the

course. However, this writing class ended up being unlike any of my previous English classes in

high school. The professor had the class setup in a way that helped me actually hone my skills as

not only a writer but as a scholar through participation in group assignments and presentations,

weekly writing blogs, and peer reviews that contained constructive feedback. The culmination of

all these things is what allowed to me to grow as a writer and take on everything required of the

class. One of the main objectives of the course was to accurately recognize rhetoric in a piece of

writing and be able to understand how it works within its rhetorical situation. Before taking this

course, I had a simple understanding of what rhetoric was and could sort of recognize it in a text,

but after these ten weeks, my skills have improved to the point that I actually feel confident in

my writing.
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Prior to taking this class I never had a solid drafting process that I went through before

completing my writing. My original drafting process consisted of me spending hours thinking

about how everything was going to work out trying to plan out the entire essay in my head. This

was not only time consuming, but it proved to be very ineffective as I would hardly produce any

writing at the end of it. When writing the Rhetorical Analysis paper, I was worried about how I

was going write it. I had chosen to focus on the novel we focused most on in class, which was I

am Legend by Richard Matheson. I followed the advice of the professor when he said to “start

writing even if you didn’t have everything figured out yet” because we would be able to see the

direction we’d want to take as we are writing and be able to figure what we’d want to talk about.

I was surprised at how much easier it was to write the essay by doing this first than spending

countless hours just thinking. I didn’t quite have my thesis figured out when I began writing but

as I started to write some of the body paragraph’s, I was able to see the connection between them

and figured out the claim that I wanted to make about the novel. I had a similar problem in

drafting when it came to the RIP project as well. I had chosen to write a short horror story and

initially had some major difficulties in deciding what I was going to write about. I believed that

the proposal that I submitted for the project was actually quite good until the professor pointed

out that the monster that I tried to create didn’t actually meet the expectations of a monster that

were laid out by Noel Carroll in her work The Nature of Horror, and my story overall sounded

like a murder mystery rather than an actual horror story. Based on the professor’s advice, I

decided to follow what Noel Carroll said and tried to make my monster more “ impure and

threatening” (Carroll 52). My drafting process for both of these assignments were different in

terms of difficulty, but both were still probably much more effective than what I was doing in the

past.
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After my completing my initial drafts for both the rhetorical analysis essay and the RIP

project, revising them became much easier than I had anticipated. This is when the peer reviews

became really helpful to me, as I made sure to understand all the feedback I gained from my

fellow classmates. I didn’t make light of the suggestions proposed by them and some were

actually the same that the professor had told me to do. For instance, one of the people that peer-

reviewed my first draft mentioned how my thesis could be more specific and stronger. He said

that “ without a clear-cut message, it becomes difficult to know exactly the overall idea of what

you’re arguing for or basing your claims about”. At first, I was having some trouble with

figuring out how to do this, but after reading some of the other student essays, it became clear of

what they meant. I noticed a pattern in how their thesis statements were formed and also how

their introductions were written. After thoroughly going over the thesis checklist and comparing

it to what I had written, I was able to figure out what needed to be done in order to revise the

essay so that it met the requirements listed. Once I was able to create a strong and direct thesis, I

was able to fix the body paragraphs so that they all build on each other and correlated to the main

claim that I had made in my thesis. When it came to my RIP project, everything did not go as

smoothly. After receiving advice from the professor on what I should adjust to my story, I had

trouble writing the story the in the way he told it should be done. I ended up writing two different

versions of the same story in which the style and monsters were different, but they both had the

same overall message. It was in the middle of this that I grew frustrated felt defeated, so I

decided to ditch the story altogether and began writing a different one.

Overall, the past ten weeks of taking this course has taught many valuable things that I

will not only apply to my future writing classes but also across my entire career as a scholar. For

instance, the drafting process that I learned from the professor in that when trying to come up
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with what to write, you should just start writing and see what it leads to. Had I done this in my

English classes in high school, I might not have grown to dislike writing so much and could have

probably been producing work that resembles my abilities. Now in the future, I know that if I

ever have trouble in figuring out what it is I want to say, I will not dwell too much in trying

figure out everything before I even begin writing. Another useful skill that I have gained from

this class is being able to utilize outside sources in order to support my claims. This was

something that I never really got down in high school and also didn’t understand why it was so

important. However, the professor made it clear as to why you need to use outside resources in

writing and how much stronger they will make it. Having put this skill to the test in the rhetorical

analysis essay, I believe that I have become very capable of bringing in the necessary outside

sources that will benefit any claims that I make. Not only will this skill come in handy in any

type of argumentative writing that I do in the future, but it will also be useful anytime I am

making an assertion and need to validate my point. Much of what I have learned in this course

will still come in handy not only in my remaining years in college but also the rest of my life.

From learning what to do when you have trouble coming up with what to write, to being able to

utilize sources to support my argument, this course provided me with so much more than I was

expecting to get out of it. Going into this course I had no expectations of me becoming a better

writer and even had doubts about being able to pass. However, I can honestly say that I am

leaving Writing 39B not only as a better writer but a more informed student with confidence in

my abilities.
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Works Cited

Carroll, Noel. “The Nature of Horror.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol.

46, no. 1, 1987, p. 51., doi:10.2307/431308.