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Tony Hua
Lynda Haas
Writing 39C
27 September 2015
The Journey is Reaching its End
Throughout high school and even now, writing has always been my weakest subject. I
entered University of California, Irvine (UCI) as an Academic English student which required
me to take extra courses before I was able to enroll in the Writing 39 series. The course I took is
called Academic English 20c and it strengthened my grammar and sentence structure. After I
completed this course, I believed that I was ready to be an academic writer. I entered Writing
39A with a goal to gain confidence in my writing and to become a better communicator. In this
course, I explored different writing style and learned how to write freely. I successfully achieved
my goals of being a better communicator and writer and received an “A” for the course because
of the amount of effort and time I dedicated to the class. With this confidence booster, I was
ready for Writing 39B.
I entered Writing 39B with confidence—too much confidence; I became arrogant and did
my assignments at the last minute which gave me a horrible experience throughout the course.
In Writing 39B, the professor focused on preparing us for Writing 39C. He advised us strongly
that we should be aware of the keywords we use for research and that we should follow the work
cited page of every credible piece we plan to use. By following the works cited page of credible
writers, it would be less work for me to research since the scholars have already have done the
research. I also learned how to engage with the text better by researching the context and author
of the story, which was a focus in 39B. For one of the projects, Rhetoric in Practice (RIP), I
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created a narrative which included the theme of the class. I had to be creative in my writing to
incorporate the theme of cyberpunk into the narrative I was creating. In addition, we had to take
responsibility in our writing by providing credible sources on a minor scale (mainly short articles)
to prove my point. Although I managed to survive the course with a “B,” I was not able to show
the professor my potential due to my arrogance and failure to manage my time properly.
I enrolled into Writing 39C feeling very discouraged and I wanted to redeem myself
because of the bad habits I developed in Writing 39B. It turns out I was not able to redeem
myself; instead I continued to turn in my assignment either last minute or late. Despite all the
difficulties during the quarter, I have absorbed and gained knowledge, and that has caused me to
improve as a writer and thinker.
I was required to use all the skills that I acquired and strengthened through the beginning
of the quarter for the Historical Conversation Project (HCP). When I was writing my H
CP draft, I incorporated many sources that were actually more relevant to the next essay,
the AP. The HCP was my first research--driven essay--it was very time consuming and tedious.
Much of the information I researched was either not relevant, or I was not able to incorporate it
into my essay without going off topic. The HCP required me to think flexibly. I could not use
the same keywords to obtain certain information. By changing terms, such as “dogs intelligence,”
to “canine cognition,” I was able to find more resourceful information that I incorporated into
both my HCP and AP essay. The most difficult struggle I had with the AP was finding the origin
of canines. When I struggled to do research on the history of dogs, I asked my peers for advice.
My keywords changed from “origin of canine” to a similar vein, “Evolution of wolves to dogs”
and “domestication of canines.” My openness to the advice of my colleagues greatly assisted me
in completing my HCP. During the research process, I utilized the search engine ANTPAC that I
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learned from my visit to the library. ANTPAC is designed to aid students into gaining access to
information that they can utilize for their research. When I conducted my research, I mainly
used google scholar to find articles and work that were relevant to my HCP and AP. After I
found articles that were interesting, I would use ANTPAC to search other works of the authors.
To my benefit, I was able to find books and research that was filled with valuable information.
In the beginning of the quarter we were required to create presentations that we either
presented ourselves or as groups. When creating our presentation and presenting it, Professor
Haas emphasized having more visuals than words so that the audience would not get bored and
follow through with our presentation. I learned that our job as presenters is to get our main
message across to our audience; instead, of overloading our audience with information. We were
able to efficiently send out message across to our audience by creating more visuals than words.
Our visuals would tell the story, while the words we included would give them the main idea.
Here are a few examples: Animals Intelligence Presentation and Social Media Campaign Draft.
The skills we learned through presenting were carried on to our Social Media campaign.
The social media campaign, an assignment that came between the HCP and AP, required
us to use social media as a medium to communicate to the public. My group decided to do a
campaign on spreading awareness for harmful and unhealthy ingredients in pet food. We were
required to spread awareness of the campaign we were doing to an audience of UCI students.
My group decided to use Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter as a mean to communicate and spread
awareness. At the time we decided to use Facebook as our home base because it seemed to be
the norm and it was convenient to post videos, images, links, and short summary for the public.
Unlike presenting to a small class, the social media campaign required us to convey our ideas
through using appropriate social media platforms. We were required to understand and research
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the current trend that efficiently induced followers. We decided that it was best to induce our
followers by having “click bait” descriptions and information such as links, images, and videos
that were short and not heavy in text. This method can be seen used on our social media home
base, Facebook and Social Media Campaign Summary. Throughout this campaign we were
required to be persistent. Despite our group having planned out the task we each would do for a
whole week, there were some concern and struggles. In the beginning, we did not produce as
much followers as we had wanted and Facebook did produce better result than Twitter. We
learned that Twitter is the quickest way to spread awareness and to gain followers because as we
followed numerous of people, we would yield some followers in return. On the other hand, we
were not able to follow other people on Facebook and Twitter that shared the same interest.
Throughout the campaign, our group had to be persistent and planned each day of the week
before we started the campaign. Although we had some difficulties that discouraged us, we
continued to explore other options that would allow us efficiently induce more followers. We
were open to new strategies that would improve our ability to use social media platforms and
gain more audience members.
Writing the final project in 39C, the AP, required me to use all the skills and abilities I
acquired and improved upon throughout the quarter. The AP consisted of two main components:
the HCP and our experience with the Social Media Campaign. We had to answer a philosophical
question and incorporate the importance of social media as a medium to spread awareness.
Looking back through the writing 39 series, I realize that Writing 39A and Writing 39B were
stepping stones to prepare us for Writing 39C. Review was way more productive in this course
than the other writing 39 series. The class was filled with scholarly writers who had a strong
argument with credible sources. Peer-review was very useful in the aspect that we could
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exchange sources and information to carve a better work on the right track. The “habits of mind”
we learned and improved were but a small milestone for us to further strengthen and utilize in
Writing 39C. Writing 39C is a research driven course that requires a lot of time and effort
because we are being pushed beyond our limits to use all the skills and abilities we acquired
throughout the writing series so that we can apply it to the real world. The realm of being an
assignment to be completed for school, now turned into the realm of the real world. We were
required to use the skills and abilities we acquired as a medium to speak out to this world. A
single voice has the potential of becoming a powerful voice joined by many others through
actions such as presentations and social media to spread awareness is what I have learned
throughout this course. This course required us to apply our knowledge in a way that we can
influence the world, and therefore we were strongly taught to take responsibility of the work we
produced by properly conducting research and citing other professions in the field.