Writing Showcase
01
Planning and Exploratory Writing
02
Peer Review
03
Self Review
04
Revision
What is this about?
This page contains an analysis of my quarter-long process for creating an analysis essay that answers the course question and a reflection of my progress toward course objectives.
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SECTION 1: Planning and Exploratory Writing
The annotations and exploratory writing I did certainly help me in the progress of achieving course objectives and answering the course question.
Personally, the most effective annotation is the one we did in the second week, which is annotating the speech Killing Us Softly and the article "Looking into the Magic Mirror".
" Advertisements that people see every day are creating figures of beauty and wealth that are hardly achieved. People receive countless advertisements of what are and how to be perfect men and women. Comparing themselves with the models in ads, people lose self-confidence because they likely find themselves nothing like the models."
By doing it, I realize how advertisements we see every day strongly form our perceptions of gender values and roles. It also helps me to build awareness of finding the gender-related messages in the films. Therefore, I'll say it develops my “habits for engaged reading”.
The most constructive exploratory writing I wrote is from Week 5. As I discussed in the blog of the podcast project, I watched and annotated a film from Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the summary of annotation, I wrote this, "One interesting thing about the Avengers series is that we rarely see stereotypes of gender values and gender roles in films, especially in the Avengers: Endgame." At that point, I started to try to find evidence for my thought, and I found out Marvel did add more feminist elements and softened figures of male superheroes. This exploratory writing contributes most of my final paper's ideas. I would count this specific exploratory writing as an inspiration of "Curiosity – the desire to know more about the world" because it brings to me new terms that I've never know before.
SECTION 2: Peer Review
Here's my feedback on the topic sentence for one of my group members, "3. 5/10 The topic sentence tells who Gaston is as well as why he is important, but it's kind of irrelevant to the rest paragraph. I think this paragraph aims to discuss that Belle is an independent girl who does not affect by feudal ideas and toxic masculinity. Therefore, if I were you, I will state Belle represents feminine independence(something like this), and on top of that, introduce Gaston." I think this is the most constructive advice I gave because I truly think her topic sentence can be better and I wish the best for her. That's why I wrote a such long paragraph for just one topic sentence. It definitely improves my "peer review skills through practice."
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The best advice I received is from Week 4 exploratory writing: Star Wars. It was from
Abigail Rose Stetter (She/Her), "I like that you are taking this idea from one of your annotations, but adding a few specific moments where you see the difference in appearance or actions would make the point clearer. Also, adding a description with the picture you included will allow for a better connection between it and the annotations you made." She gives helpful, positive, and encouraging advice that really inspired me. Her advice help me to able to realize my disadvantages so that I can learn from them and do better in the future. I certainly "understand the importance of peer review to my own reading and writing" from this experience.
SECTION 3: Self-Review
Here's my annotation of the thesis statement, "One of my points isn't included in the thesis statement. I should add one more sentence to state that Disney hasn't achieved gender equity in its films." After reading my essay three times, I realized my thesis statement isn't comprehensive enough to cover all of my main points below, so I have to revise it then I wouldn't have off-topic parts later.
When I was writing this sentence, I just assumed that my audience knows which films and characters I referring to, but they don't. Therefore, I put this in my annotation, "which films and characters? Since I put the name of the films in the thesis statement, don't need to say ’several films and characters‘ here to cause confusion."
Doing self-review, I start to "Understand the importance of self review". We all make mistakes when writing a long essay, and that's inevitable because mistakes happen unconsciously. That's what self-review so important for the reason we are the only ones who care about our own writings.
SECTION 4: Revision
The first major revision I did is the thesis statement. As I mentioned in the self-review section, I think my thesis statement is not comprehensive enough. Therefore, I rewrite my thesis statement, adding "its goal of gender equity hasn't achieved in the films" into the third sentence of my thesis statement to make it better.
I made my second changes in the introduction section. I feel like it's inappropriate to say "several films and characters" and not specify them, so I decide to say "changes in gender values represented by characters" instead of "several films and characters" since the whole essay is about changes in gender values and roles.
Link to my final version Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AM3W5AzpxdENa7d677hAaTQOEDDLOcu9ukXvYAIYCJ0/edit?usp=sharing