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Pedro Castillo Munoz

Professor Haas
Writing 37
March, 4th 2015
My Writing 37 Adventure: Critical Reading and Rhetoric
Now that I am being exposed to college level classes just like I expect the level of
complexity to go up, I also expect my writing abilities to increase and get me closer to the
skilled writer that I want to become (The Writing Struggle (Week 1 Reflection Blog)).
Although there is always room for improvement, today I am proud to say that the goal I set
for myself in this reflection blog roughly nine weeks ago has been achieved. I knew since the
beginning that persistence was going to be key to my success in this class. Writing 37 is an
intensive writing course that walks students through the process of writing, introduces
rhetorical principles, and exposes them to scholarly readings. The professors designs
assignments that requires the student to be very curious about and fully engage in the subject
matter, in my case the human relationship and interaction with animals. Upon reflection I am
able to match every assignment I have completed with a specific skill or trait that this course
intents to improve or develop on the student. I was able to improve my critical reading skills
by being exposed to different types of literature works; discussing in small group helped me
perform deep analysis and fully understand the purpose behind every piece of literature.
Exposure to other types of literary works, such as comics and documentaries, contributed to
the development of my ability to identify the rhetoric of these works and analyze how it
appeals to the audience. In general, this course taught me many useful techniques that I am
completely sure I will be able to apply later in my educational and professional career.

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One of the main goals of writing 37 is to expose students to different types of texts
that call for new readings processes and analysis techniques. Throughout my high school
career, my English teachers kept my range of literary works limited to simple ones such as
short stories, fictional novels, and short articles. We would utilize this sources for no more
than one month, write an essay or a couple paragraphs on it and move on to the next literary
work. In writing 37, however, I was presented with scholarly texts that directly appeal our
theme. The chapters from Leslie Irvines book, If you Tame me, for example contained
information that was difficult to understand because I did not have the critical reading skills
necessary to fully understand the text. Nevertheless, with the help of the Connect Assignment
I developed new techniques that I had never applied nor needed before. More specifically, in
order to be able to understand the material I needed to take several steps in a specific order.
First, I started to look at the titles and subtitles and try to predict what the chapter/section
might discuss. Moreover, I began to highlight the first and last sentence of every paragraph as
I skim read chapters. Lastly, I would make notes of specific things as I read, such as
examples, analysis sentences, references to other sources, etc. In brief, exposure to more
scholarly sources of information, such as Irvines If You Tame Me, helped me develop reading
techniques that allowed me to fully understand scholarly material and apply it to my own
causes.
Additional to printed sources, writing 37 also provides the students with other types of
texts such as documentaries and public service announcements. By introducing these news
types of texts, the students are pushed to take a different approach to analyze and interpret
them. More specifically, my writing 37 professor, Lynda Haas, put the class into small groups
and assigned the elaboration of a public service announcement (PSA). At first without
noticing, we became very knowledgeable about rhetoric and the vital role that it plays when
trying to persuade and call a certain audience to action. Although the first draft of our PSA

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received a lot of negative feedback, we realized that we needed to be very open-minded and
flexible in order to come together and realize that we needed to include all three appeals to
successfully convince the audience. One of the ways we did this was by finding a background
song that mixed well with graphic pictures in order to make the audience feel guilt and feel
the desire to help the animals. We also established credibility by utilizing People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), a well-known animal rights organization, as our
sponsors. Lastly, we included an interview with a graduate student currently doing research at
the University of California, Irvine (UCI) on specific topic that our PSA addressed (stop
experimentation on macaques). This interview worked as a credible source of information
and statistics that appeal to the logistics of the issue while also directly appealing to our
intended audience, UCI students and staff. Although this sounds like a lot of progress, all of it
would have not been possible if it was not for the practice on analyzing the rhetoric of a text
that we, the students, experienced when watching Blackfish. This documentary relies on
numerous rhetorical devices to convey the message that the treatment that SeaWorld gives its
orcas is very inhumane and it yields negative results for both humans and animals. Despite
the fact that later in the course I went on to write a rhetorical analysis about this documentary,
the exposure to this film, the deep discussions and detailed blogs that we had to write based
on it helped me get a very concrete idea of what rhetoric is and understand the role that it
plays in communication. Once I had acquired these useful techniques, I was ready to
incorporate them on my writing and take my writing to an academic level.
My favorite part of this course was being able to apply the techniques and skills that I
have discussed above to my writing and analyzing the effect that these skills had on my
writing through peer reviews and collaborations with the rest of the students. My skills were
first tested when writing the literature review essay for the theme of my choice, which was
the trend of anthropomorphizing animals to provide a different perspective on a specific

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issue. I first had to learn what a literature review essay is and what its main purpose is. I went
on to realize that extensive writing projects, such as scholarly essays or research studies,
usually have a review of what other experts on the field have already said as part of their
introduction. Although I had clear what the purpose of this essay was, I struggled with my the
second body paragraph of my essay. In other words, I failed to put the authors into
conversation through my paragraph and lost focus and summarized what the authors had
said without connecting to the argument that I was interested on. At this point, peer review
was very useful to me because my reviewers gave me very good feedback that helped me
narrow down the things that I needed to revise and give priority to. Likewise, I made my
responsibility to give my peers good, relevant feedback that could help them identify their
major flaws and work on improving them. Regarding my literature review essay, I was
advised to add another source that will help connect the ones that I already have. More
specific, I added reviews that other scholars have made on the comics that I was basing my
argument on, which was We3. By doing this, my body paragraph flowed much better and
displayed an actual conversation among scholarly critics in which they talked about aspects
of We3 directly appealed to my main argument. In doing all of this, I learned the importance
of summarizing and synthesizing and how I can use these two techniques in my writing to
make it more creative.
Lastly, another assignment in which my writing skills were tested and improved was
the rhetorical analysis essay that I performed on Blackfish. The main goal of this essay was to
analyze the choice of rhetorical devices used by the author and interpret them together with
the background to come to a conclusion. I decided to analyze the use of detailed footage of
the orcas and the numerous interviews with different characters that the director, Gabriela
Cowperthwaite, included in her documentary. After receiving very useful feedback from my
reviewers and discussing my essay with them, I determined that out of all the paragraphs the

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first body paragraph of my rhetorical analysis essay needed quite a lot of work but showed
the most potential to be accurate, thus helping the reader come to a conclusion of what the
documentary is trying to communicate. Although the analysis part of the paragraph was good
enough, in order to fully communicate my point I needed to change the structure and order of
the paragraph. More specifically, my argument was that the documentary Blackfish damages
the reputation of SeaWorld by proving the guidelines of hiring that SewWorld follows to be
false. In order to convey this point, I first focused on all the interviews and commercials that
show the false claim that SeaWorld required a lot of expertise to hire their animal trainers.
Next, I went on to describe the many ways in which Cowperthwaite proves this to be false so
that the reader can then come to the conclusion what SeaWorld is doing goes out our limits
and yields negative consequences.
In conclusion, writing 37 was very successful in teaching me skills and lessons that
will be of great use later in my career as a writer and engineer. I developed strategies to tackle
academic and high-level scholarly texts, absorb and understand the material for the specific
cause I need it for. A new perspective was brought to my attention, which is to analyze the
rhetoric of, not only printed texts, but every communication that I encounter in my daily life.
Being able to identify the rhetoric will help me understand what a certain piece of literature,
research paper, etc is trying to make me understand. Furthermore, I learned to appreciate the
concept of revision and providing feedback. This proves that being flexible and openminded will always help me improve my work in every aspect. This essay allowed me to
reflect on all of the progress that I have made and it made me feel very proud and productive,
mainly because I would have guessed that one could learn so much from a writing class that
last only ten weeks. Now, I am determined to apply all of this concepts to every area that I
possibly can and hope that I can improve as I work my way through my college career.
Special thanks to Professor Haas for all of her efforts and willingness to help.