Writing Showcase
This page is a summary of what I have done to write my quarter-long analysis paper and connect this to our course objectives about developing habits for engaged reading, feeling more confident of my reading accuracy, understanding the importance of having a process when I am composing a sophisticated text, and habits of Mind. My essay is about how Disney fairy tale films depict female gender roles through portraits of princesses characters and how they change through time. Through this paper, I have learned many things including collaborations, independent thinking, learning from mistakes, as well as course objectives like developing habits for engaged reading. Following are four specific sections that reflect how I manage my process toward the final essay and course objectives.
Section 1: Planning and Exploratory Writing
(screenshot of exploratory writing on week two: Beauty and the Beast)
This is a screenshot from exploratory writing 2: Beauty and the Beast. And the sentences above shows how I annotate a specific scene that shows toxic masculinity and helps develop ideas about gender roles in the podcast. In this assignment, I develop the objective of feeling more confident of my reading accuracy. I learned to be very careful when I was reading or watching something and wrote down ideas that were important.
(screenshot of annotation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)
Above is a screenshot from one of my blog: Extra Credit: annotation of an additional film. In this blog, I watched Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and recorded what I was thinking at the time. When I was writing this blog, I developed two habits of mind and they were curiosity and responsibility. I did not just watching it and said Snow White was beautiful. Instead, I looked inside the movie and found things that I was curious about: why did this movie show Snow White's physical beauty and passivity? Then I wrote down many details as I can to show my responsibility of this blog.
Zhihan Liu
Economics and Anthropology
Hello! I am a sophomore student majoring in Economics and Anthropology. This is my last entry level writing course and I am very happy and lucy to meet you.
Section 2: Peer Review
(An excerpt that represents the best advice I gave)
This is a peer review and advice I gave to Tayven to revise his introduction part of the essay. I think this is the best advice I gave because I closely read all his paragraphs and provided details for him to consider. I told him both his advantages and disadvantages. And I gave my specific opinions on how to revise. By providing this peer review, I learned three course objectives and they were developing habits for engaged reading and responsibility in habits of mind, as well as Improving my peer review skills through practice.
(An excerpt that represents the best advice I received)
This is a peer review I received from Yve, who is also my group member of podcast project. I think this is the best advice I received because it is thorough and helpful. It is also very reasonable and sincere. And it tells me an aspect that I did not realize when I was writing and reviewing my paper. By reading this peer review and revise my paper later, I learned one habit of mind which is openness. And I understand the importance of peer review to my own reading and writing.
Section 3: Self-Review
(Annotation one I made during the self-review process)
This is a place where I think I should revise some of my sentences to make my statement more persuasive. I also find out that I need to revise some words and choose more concise ones to articulate my point of view. During this process, I learned to understand the importance of having a process when I am composing a sophisticated text, And develop effective habits for my own writing process. Self-review process is important because we cannot always rely on other people's opinion to revise our own work. We also need to develop our own process of reviewing and find a way to polish our works by ourselves.
(Annotation two I made during the self-review process)
This is a place where I think I should revise my topic sentence to make it consistent with the other paragraphs. It is always important to do the self-review because some of the problems are easy to find as long as we read the passage. And the topic sentences for each paragraph are very important because they can decide where the whole paper flows to. During this process, I learned to understand the importance of self review, and developed Metacognition (reflection) which is a habit of mind.
Section 4: Revision
1.
(First introduction paragraph before revising)
(First introduction paragraph after revising)
This is my introduction paragraph. As it is the beginning of the whole passage, it is very important to show its authority. Before editing, my first version of the paragraph shows relatively low authority because I put the scholars and sociologists' comment after discussion of Disney's great impact. After getting constructive advice from my professor Haas, I revised it into the second one. In this case, the paragraph flows more fluently, and it is more academic.
2.
(thesis before editing)
(thesis after editing)
This is my thesis of the whole essay. Before I revise it, it looks like a little loose and cannot answer the course question directly. After adopting my professor's advice, I changed it into the second version. It looks better as it addresses the course question directly by arguing the change of princesses' characteristics which shows change of female gender roles.