Dear Reader,

This quarter has been one like no other. Much has happened during these past six weeks,

considering I took this course during the summer while going through a year long pandemic.

Coming into this course, I was dreading the idea of having to write essays and assignments, but

with the help of my instructor Julie Johnson, nothing seemed like too much for me. We started

off by learning some basics to writing, like how all writing contains a rhetorical situation, which

includes an exigence (purpose), audience, and constraints. In Karen Rosenberg’s “Reading

Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources” she emphasizes that reading a scholarly article

is like participating in a conversation, saying that “academic writers do not make up their

arguments at the top of their heads.”1 This is something we were able to practice in this course

with our literature reviews, taking information from other sources and adding on to it with our

own thoughts.

As I said above, I had been dreading having to write essays and such; I never really

considered myself to be the best writer, especially since it takes a lot of patience and attention for

me to write an essay (I get distracted very easily, so it always takes me a long time to actually get

writing on paper). However, having been able to choose my own topic for my literature review

gave me a bit more freedom to actually write about something that was more interesting to me

than having to write about a topic given to me. Due to recent events that I have noticed on the

news, I decided to make my topic for my essay about women’s reproductive rights, specifically

on the subject of abortions. Abortion is a very sensitive topic to many. Some people stand in the

position of pro-choice, where they believe women bear the decision on whether or not they want

an abortion when coming across an unexpected pregnancy while others are pro-life, who believe

that abortion is bad and should not be permitted since it kills an unborn child. In my literature

1
Rosenberg, Karen. “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources” Writing Spaces: Readings on
Writing, Volume 2, ed. Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemaliansky.
review, I go on to talk about how women have had to endure harsh obstacles surrounding sexism

when arriving upon the topic of abortion and their reproductive rights.

After having written my Literature Review and getting feedback on it, I was able to make

a few changes to it to create an even stronger argument. The first most important thing that

makes up a good essay is the thesis statement. If my thesis statement is confusing, then my

readers will also be confused upon reading my work. In my first draft of my literature review, I

had a pretty decent thesis, but for my revision I decided to change a few of the words to make

my point a bit more clear for my audience. Along with tweaking my thesis a bit, I added some

more descriptions to my last body paragraph, which contrasted Ireland and the United States

upon their positions on the topic of abortion. In recent events, we see that the U.S. has actually

regressed when it comes to the subject of abortion, creating more laws that create restrictions on

it. Ireland on the other hand has been advancing towards a more liberal thought process

regarding abortions, getting rid of their harsh restrictions. After having done my research on this

topic, I was able to learn a lot more about people’s overall views on abortion and how this fight

towards women’s reproductive freedoms has never been a linear process; We see progress

happen in some places while regression occurs in others. This has really opened my eyes to see

how others view women’s rights: do people actually care about the life of an unborn child or are

they just projecting their misogyny and trying to control women’s bodies?

For my weebly website, I decided to present it in a way that represents myself as a

person. I wanted to make it simple so nobody would get confused when viewing it. I also

incorporated a lot of green into it for the sole purpose of it being my favorite color. I wanted my

readers and viewers to get a feel for who I am as a person since we can’t really communicate in
person or gather together. However, soon we will all be back at Santa Barbara and everything

will be as normal as can be. Hope you all can find some sort of enjoyment from my portfolio!

Sincerely,

Chelsey Macias

😏
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