Self-Reflective Introduction

Entering Writing 39C, I hated research papers. I felt that researching a topic and writing
a comprehensive essay on it was one of the hardest things to do in a writing class. After Writing
39C, I stand by my original opinion that research essays are one of the hardest kinds of essays to
write. However, I felt that I have improved a bit throughout the course.
I learned that the actual research is the central focus of the writing process and that good
research can make writing the essay extremely easier. I was able to learn new methods of
researching. Before this class, I only ever knew of scholar.google.com to search up academic
sources of information. Even then, I only typed in the most basic keywords and did not really
know about using synonyms or related terms to improve my search results. During the class, I
learned about using the UCIs library website. I was able to search up different articles on
multiple different databases and find related keywords within those articles that were able to help
me find even more related articles. Overall, the researching process helped me figure out what
aspect of my topic I wanted to focus on. At first, my topic was about the air pollution that comes
from airports. I later focused in on the effects of ultrafine particles which are emitted from
airports. However, as I started researching for my second composition, I found little solutions to
the emissions of ultrafine particles and instead found an overwhelming amount on the emissions
of carbon dioxide. At that point, this new research showed me that the majority of climate
change debates are most concerned about the dangers of carbon dioxide, so I changed my focus
to be on carbon dioxide emissions.
This was also the first class in which I had to present a multimodal composition. In my
first composition, I found it hard to find images that were related to my topic, and I was only
able to incorporate one image into my essay. Even then, the image was still somewhat unrelated
to my essay and was poorly introduced and analyzed. While preparing for my presentation, I
spent a lot more time looking up pictures and graphs that were about my topic and I was able to
recycle some of these pictures into my composition. I was able to find pictures on the life-span
of CO
2
particles as well as a pie chart on the sources of the majority of carbon dioxide emissions.
During my pre-writing process, I was lazy on writing my annotations and source
evaluations. As a result, I was not as knowledgeable as I should be on the main supporters and
opponents of my topic. I was also unable to effectively introduce their voices when I wrote my
compositions and that probably hurt my own ethos. As a result, my ability to look through my
sources and figure out their credibility was somewhat lacking. However, as I learned more about
my issue of air pollution, I was able to figure out which facts were true or not based on how
realistic it seemed compared to other sources.
Although I was not able to introduce the majority of my sources too well, I was able to
minimize the amount of times I quoted the speaker directly. In fact, the only time I did use a
direct quote was as the hook for my second composition. The other times that I referred to my
sources were mostly through paraphrasing and summarizing. Although I was able to avoid block
quotation, my analysis of the evidence I presented was pretty bad. I found myself constantly
feeling like I couldnt add anything to the ideas presented by these people. In the end, I felt like
my own thoughts ended up being shaped by the opinions presented by the supporters of my topic
so much so that adding my thoughts may have been repetitive. I felt that what they said about
the issue of global warming was so obvious that it seemed to be common sense. This remained
true as I found that countless news sources seemed to have the same general idea that scientists
are providing data that climate change is a big deal that is being pushed aside for other issues.
These thoughts ended up making me feel that analysis was unnecessary as they were the same
thoughts that my sources provided; this led to an abysmal analysis of evidence which probably
hurt my grades a great deal.
Presentations and any form of public speaking is another big weakness of mine. I was
able to improve a good deal recently, however. Last quarter, in Writing 37, giving presentations
was one of the bigger focuses of the class. By the end of the quarter, I felt like I gave a
presentation at least once every other week. That class did teach me a lot about giving a good
presentation. I learned that having an image as the central point of the slide followed with a
sentence or two is more entertaining to the audience. I also became a bit better at speaking out
loud in front of a group of people and it felt a bit less scary. However, when it came time to
present in Writing 39C, all those lessons flew out the door. I was once again nervous to speak in
front of a class, and Im pretty sure I stuttered for the majority of it. Due to my poor planning, I
was unprepared during my presentation and ended up leaving out a good bit of what I had
wanted to say. There was even a graph that I included in my presentation that I completely
forgot to explain, because I was so nervous.
It was helpful watching the other presentations. As there were two other people working
on the topic of air pollution, I was able to see two other approaches to solving the problem of air
pollution by observing what cause they were addressing. The advocacy presentation helped me
reevaluate my problem. While looking up possible solutions, I found a lot of news reports on S.
332. This bill led me to reframe my problem to focus on carbon dioxide emissions rather than
ultrafine particle emissions from airports. This change caused me to rewrite what I had already
written in my first draft and essentially restart my research process.