The Value of Writing
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Writing is a way to communicate with others and freely express ourselves. The concept allows us to embrace our voice in times when we cannot find the courage to speak our mind verbally. Writing is essential when facing reality. It is a vital asset skill to have despite your futuristic desires, which is why we all must learn how to write efficiently by consistently challenging ourselves and exercising our writing skills to apply it in the future.
Artifact 1
Presenting Yourself
The first task that was assigned at the beginning of the Winter quarter was "me in six words." We were all asked to introduce ourselves to the class using only six words that summarize our lives and who we are as a person. One of the words that I chose was "explore." My running curiosity and urge to experience new things demonstrate who I am as a person. We had to create a slide show, and I remember being a nervous wreck because we had to present in front of the entire class within a two-minute timeframe. The directions were only to write six words, one word and one photo per slide, and give—a brief explanation as to why we chose that specific word to the class. My six words were: fashion, social, explore, nature, photography, and athlete. Overall, I had to verbally explain the significance of the word and provide examples of how this word is part of who I am. I also had to discuss why the photo correlates with the particular word. This short assignment also allowed me to get to know my classmates, and I was able to get a sense of who they are as a person, which allowed me to part of an academic discourse community. Being allowed only to choose six words to share with the class entitled me to convey my academic ethos carefully. I had to pick my words delicately to sound enthralling yet precise enough to get my message across.
Artifact 1 Image: An excerpt from a slide from my first assignment in Writing 39B, Me in Six Words.
Artifact 2
Let Your Voice Be Heard
In my blog post for week five, "Don't Let the Five-Paragraph Formula Silence Your Voice," I ranted about how the five-paragraph formula is an academic concept which interpreted in many classrooms. The notion laid out like wildfire harming the education of a multitude of students. The method is a formulaic way of quickly writing academic essays. It is a five-step formula that consists of an introduction, three analytical paragraphs, and a concluding paragraph that restates the thesis. In my opinion, a well-developed essay does not follow a particular structure, format, or template. The formula has undoubtedly helped me during elementary and early phases of middle school. Still, I learned to develop more concrete details onto my essays, which ended up dispatching me from using the formula. However, some don't understand that one needs to step out of their comfort zone and disobey the constraints of following the five-paragraph essay to grow as a writer, which means putting an end to the simple five-paragraph formula. All blog posts require a minimum of 250 words, but you can always exceed that minimum requirement. Each blog post is a reflection of the week, and they are due every single Sunday at 11:59 PM. I sincerely enjoy writing blog posts because I can freely express myself and free my thoughts of the week. However, you are required to answer the prompt in its entirety, and upload a photo with a caption that correlates with the blog. These reflections allow me to gain a deeper understanding of what I have learned by demonstrating my knowledge through blogs. Participating in the exercise will enable me to part of an academic discourse community as well. Blog posts help spread awareness about valuable information through the attraction of visual appeals, which is part of our habits of mind, demonstrating engagement and creativity. Blog posts express creativity by carefully choosing photos that support our writings and formating in a visually appealing way. Creating an aesthetically appealing blog post attracts the public and makes them engage in your writings.
Artifact 2 Image: A screenshot of a piece of my blog section.
Reflection:
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Effectively communicating with others is an essential tool in achieving understanding and establishing secure connections with specific individuals. Learning how to communicate effectively is a crucial skill to have when getting thrown out in the real world. Having the capability of being able to discuss difficult topics such as death can help shape us into a better version of ourselves for our futuristic desires. Being introduced to death and familiarizing myself with the subject, I learned to fully understand the process and how one can find ways to cope with the tragedy. Familiarizing myself with the matter was challenging, I had to listen to podcasts, do readings, and glance at images; especially since I am in the combo course Writing 39B and English 10B. The podcasts and readings were spiraling with emotions of frustration and sorrow. When glancing at images, I was able to see the heartache and gain a better understanding of what type of pain one may be enduring. All these types of communication helped me understand the stages of grief and the process of mourning. Learning about these aspects while taking the classes allowed me to expand my knowledge about how to convey ideas towards a sensitive topic. While analyzing the types of expressions, I often reminded myself of the loss of my father, and so I was able to draw connections. Gaining the tools to understand and convey ideas about death and the process of mourning without choking is going to help me in the long run. This capability helped me in writing the RA essay, and it is also going to allow me to accurately write an upcoming assignment where I am going to have to create a memoir of a time where I have experienced a tragic loss.
As a student who is part of the Writing 39B course, I must follow the course objectives, and part of the course objectives is to understand the significance of how a piece of a text portrays its "rhetorical situation." Including the genre conventions and historical and cultural context. I wrote my memoir based on the topic of death. Writing or discussing death creates an awkward tension as most people prefer to ignore the topic rather than acknowledge the difficulties. My memoir stressed the importance of not falling into temptations when losing someone important in your life. Validating who you are and finding ways to cope healthily rather than going to drugs and alcohol as an easy escape. I did this by revealing my experience with loss to my audience. In my hometown, people leaned on these temptations to numb any pain or ease their anxiety, but I want to demonstrate that there are other ways to deal with these emotions that will not negatively affect us as a whole. Since I struggled with portraying sensory details in the past, throughout the whole writing process of the memoir, I focused on conveying a vast amount of details to portray emotion. This act had led me to exceed the maximum word count.
In my first draft, I had plenty of grammar errors, and in my second, I sounded rushed when conveying my intended message. I was aware that I needed my memoir to remain descriptive to convey emotion, but I was struggling with maintaining within the word count range. I decided to keep on being detailed in all my paragraphs because it plays a significant role in my memoir, despite if I exceed the maximum word limit. I emailed my professor, and she kindly said it is okay. If I refrained from being as detailed as I can be, then my memoir would not create such an emotional impact, and my intended message would not get across to my audience.
For my final draft, I was able to edit and fix all my grammar mistakes. I was able to add a few more details for clarity in my essay. Making these improvements, despite how small or big, demonstrates my contribution of attempting to meet the RP memoir essay rubric's requirements, which means that I am part of an academic discourse community. I believe that by doing so, I satisfied the course objectives, and demonstrated my understanding of its significance.
Demonstrating Progress
RP Memoir Essay #1 Draft:
RP Memoir Essay #2 Draft
RP Memoir Final Draft:
Artifact 3 Images: Two excerpts demonstrating my progression of my RP Memoir Essay.
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A Creative Flow
In my RP Memoir Essay, I had the opportunity to express all of my emotions creatively. Demonstrating creativity was part of our habits of mind, and I believe that my detailed descriptions conveyed a vast amount of imagery, which allowed me to be creative. I used the memoir, Unremarried Widow, as an example for which rhetorical techniques to incorporate onto my memoir. Henderson used plenty of imagery through her descriptions of her surroundings, so I wanted to demonstrate what I have learned in my essay by implying sensory details to allow the audience to understand where and what I was feeling throughout my experience.
I wanted to incorporate dialogue in my essay to provide clarity on what is going on. I also wanted to allow my audience to understand what I am feeling. The pieces of dialogue that I added in my essay were the moments that I remembered so clearly when I thought my day was not going to be as bad as expected to when everything came crumbling down. I added an internal dialogue because I wanted the reader to be inside my head. I was trapped with my thoughts that I kept to myself; I finally allowed myself to express all of my emotions. I was able to express my creative outlet, and creative writing happens to be my favorite kind of writing. I feel like My RP memoir essay demonstrated creativity through the use of dialogue, description, and a few of my employed metaphorical statements. These strategies allowed me to convey my intended message to the reader while they relive my experience and draw a connection to my character. As a student in Writing 39B--an academic discourse community, I believe that we should never let go of our creativity and that we should embrace our creative thoughts.
Artifact 4 Image: An excerpt from a piece of my RP Memoir Essay where I used sensory details.
Artifact 5
Trust Yourself
In Writing 39B, our theme was the rhetoric of mourning. Thus, we had to read and write passages that revolved around the process of losing someone or something that we held dearly in our hearts. For instance, in my RP Memoir essay, I wrote about my experience of losing a parent at a young age. It was vital for me to understand how genre conventions can affect the significance of my memoir. My intended message was to learn how to avoid temptations that will bring nothing but harm when grieving the loss of a loved one. Just because you lost someone, does not mean you have to lose yourself too. For the first draft of my memoir, I ended my essay when I found out about my papá's death. I left my memoir unfinished and decided to end the story there to create suspense and a craving to read more. I wanted to stop at the most significant part of the whole experience, like the peak point of memoir where I begin exposing my vulnerability to my audience. I looked at the word count of my memoir, and I saw that I already hit 1,800 words, and I was nowhere near done. I was afraid of getting penalized for going beyond the word count max,but I felt the urge to keep all of my details because I believed that they were necessary to convey emotion,relevance, and clarity. Without details, it would just be typed words on a Word document, rather than a demonstration of real pain that can help others cope. In my second draft, I was still nervous about my word count, but I even allowed myself to explain my experience thoroughly and convey all of my emotions throughout the memoir.
I portrayed dialogue with the most significant people of my experience to give my audience reliability while giving them a chance to see everything that had happened to me through the imagery that I employed. Although the ending to my second draft sounded rushed, so for my final draft, I changed a few details to make the ending tie in with the entire memoir. Throughout my memoir, I provided examples of how I learned from my past. I also demonstrated ways of how I coped with loss without falling for temptations. By portraying these rhetorical strategies to convey my intended message to my targeted audience, I was allowed to demonstrate my growth as a writer and all the concepts that I had to learn by being a part of an academic discourse community.
Artifact 5 Image: An excerpt of the ending of my RP Memoir essay.
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Being Vulnerable Means Being Authentic
The process of writing my RP Memoir Essay was complicated, as I felt vulnerable when writing the piece. I knew what I was getting myself into when I chose a sensitive topic to write about, but I did not think that I would feel so exposed to my audience. However, I am okay with demonstrating my vulnerability to the public because this gives an authentic tone of writing. Authenticity builds credibility and allows the reader to relate to both the message and the writer. In this essay, I was granted total freedom to write about my experience using techniques that I learned in class. Having freedom meant that we did not have to follow strict guidelines, which means that the outcome of the essay can either turn out awful or brilliantly written. I know there were times when I was not too fond of the thought of peer review, but without this task, I would have been lost. I was able to gain feedback through peer review and get inspiration from my other classmates' essays. When revising our classmate's paper, I was looking for a few things: dialogue, sensory details, and emotion. I looked at the RP Rubric requirements, and as long as we conveyed our intended message using the proper tools, then we were going to be okay. However, we did have to keep an eye out for any grammar mistakes, which I am guilty of doing. The peer-review benefited my essay, as I took their feedback into careful consideration to see which areas I need to improve on. I am grateful for peer review because it has helped me grow as a writer. Through peer review, I was able to continue my part of being part of an academic discourse community. I believe everyone who writes any piece of text should ask others to revise their writings to demonstrate growth.
Artifact 6 Images: Two screenshots of the feedback that I had received for my RP Memoir Essay
Final Reflection:
The purpose of my RP Memoir Essay was to spread awareness. Awareness about learning to cope with the loss of a loved one, without falling into the arms of temptation. I conveyed my intended message through many tools of which I learned in class during group activities such as dialogue, setting, and character development using vivid detailing. In my hometown, people would use alcohol and drugs as an easy escape that will numb the pain. In my memoir, I want to address different the importance of converting that pain into a drive. I demonstrated this by expressing my emotions and allowing the audience to visualize my experience. No one wants to deal with their pain, but I want to reveal the importance of coping and convince others not to fall into temptations. I asked my professor if she believed that my essay met the RP Rubric's requirements, and she responded with, "well, what do your peers think?" According to my peers and based on their feedback, it seems that I have adequately met the requirements. I received compliments about how well I conveyed details through peer review and through the presentation in class, where we all gave a short reading of our memoir. Conveying such imagery permits the audience to understand my emotions and allow them to visualize themselves in my shoes during that moment. These compliments make me feel proud of all the effort I put into my essay.
Although I do wish that I had more time and more room to express every single emotion and write every small detail of that entire experience, I did my best to work with what I had. Overall, I indeed found peace in writing this memoir, as it helped me cope and release all the emotions that I had inside of me. I felt exposed when writing this essay, but throughout the process, I found myself releasing all the thoughts that I had kept inside, which brought me peace. I hope that people will read my essay in the future and inspire them to find peace within themselves too.