Writing Showcase
On this page, you will follow my journey throughout the past 9-10 weeks of my Writing 39A course at the University of California, Irvine. I will be analyzing my work, explaining my process of writing, and reflecting on my progress towards achieving the course objectives. At the end of this page, you will find a link to my final essay that I have been working towards all quarter.
Planning and Exploratory Writing
Exploratory Writing: On Social Construction
In this assignment, I watched a video and explored the meaning of social construction. I was curious to learn the ways society has been influenced by media and each meaning we created as a society. In my writing, I highlighted an example of social construction. This was an idea I came up on my own but one example that was provided in the video was how we refer girl with pink and boys with blue (very common for gender reveal parties).
Jean Kilbourne, Killing Us Softly Annotations
To the left, is an annotation from a video I watched by Jean Kilbourne. In this video, Kilbourne speaks about the way the media influences what beauty is. In the image, I included is a screenshot of one of the annotations I made during the video. I find it so upsetting that the media portrays unrealistic standards for women through ads, billboards and so much more. Through this assignment, I annotated a video to improve my written and digital literacy across media.
Peer Review
In the past 9-10 weeks my classmates and I have been trying to answer the question, "How do Disney films contribute to the construction of society's values and norms about gender roles? How have these values changed over time?" This past week, we have started to write our essay to wrap up the quarter. Our professor gave us different due dates to keep on track. For example, one of the first things we submitted was our introduction paragraphs. Our class was able to engage with other to give and receive feedback to improve our essays. To the right is an example of one of my best advice I gave to a fellow classmate. It is a bit lengthy because I like to give advice to the best of my ability to help others out so I only highlighted to key points.
Best Advice I Gave
For this assignment, I had to analyze a film from Disney, more specifcally a superhero film. I chose the movie Doctor Strange. This was the best advice I received because in my writing, I tend to always go off-topic or summarize an article instead of analyzing it. Through this assignment and advice, I am working towards developing effective habits for my own writing process.
Best Advice I Received
Self Review
Self Review 1
Self Review 2
One of the major things I need to work on is my conclusion. My conclusion does not really conclude/ give final thoughts. This assignment helped me to understand the importance of having a process when you are composing a sophisticated text. Having a process when composing a text is important because it will help strengthen my writing. First drafts always have room for improvement so it is good to go over your essay as well as have a second eye look over your essay.
Another thing I need to work on (this includes all writing of my own) is expanding my vocabulary. I tend to use the same words and I started to sound repetitive. Overall self reviewing can be referred to as metacognition which is the ability to critique my own work/ thought process. This is important because it will help me develop habits that will help me for future writing.
Revision
I don't have any before and after pictures but the part that is crossed out is what I took out and the highlighted green portion is how I revised this part of my introduction. Not only did I make it sound better but I added a source to make my work more credible. Once again this has helped me develop effective habits for my own writing process.
Essay Revision 1
In my revision on the right, I shortened my summary about the film Snow White shorter. For one of my peer reviews, I was advised to make it shorter because my summary for Mulan was shorter and straight to the point. This helps my essay to be more concise and straight to the point.
