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Nelly Wong

Mr. McClure

Writing 39B

22 March 2017

Reflection Essay

Writing 39B was a very interesting adventure. To start of this essay, I would like to share

a personal story. I was very close to dropping the class for two reasons: one being that the class is

nine-thirty in the morning on Mondays and Wednesdays, two being I was going to sleep at four

in the morning the night before the first day of class, knowing very well that if I did not show up

for the first day of class, I would get dropped from it. I decided to try and go to class because I

read the email sent out by my writing teacher, Mr. McClure, saying the topic for the writing class

is modern horror. I enjoy watching horror and thought it would be a very intriguing topic so why

not? I went to class thinking I was going to fall asleep, but that was quite the opposite. Mr.

McClure introduced the class criteria and the horror genre alluring me to its beauty. Right off the

bat we were told only two assignments in the class really mattered: the rhetorical analysis essay

and the rhetoric in practice project. Through this class, I learned what rhetoric means, in short it

is the art of persuasion. By reading scholarly texts and doing different rhetorical writing

assignments in the horror genre, I was able to grasp this concept and write my own rhetorical

analysis and furthermore create a film with my group involving rhetoric in a different medium. I

am proud to say I fulfilled this courses objectives over the span of ten weeks but more

importantly I learned a lot about writing and the beauty behind it.

To understand the concept of rhetoric and rhetorical analysis, I learned this through the

horror genre by working on the two-sentence horror story exercise we did in class ultimately
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contributing to the RA essay. Rhetoric is a way to say something, the way a writer expresses

themselves to an audience. This involves diction, syntax, grammar- all the materials of the

written language, its substance. Rhetorical analysis involves the relationship between author,

text, and audience. The two sentence horror story required me to look at diction, tone, grammar,

syntax, and punctuation. This exercised my ability to to analyze each word and how it

contributes to the sentence as a whole to create the horror. Furthermore, it helped me understand

how to read texts closely and see how every text grows out of and reflects its rhetorical situation.

By doing this assignment, it gave me perspective on how to comprehend I Am Legend.

Reflecting on the horror genre and its rhetoric, according to distinguished English professors

Magistrale and Morrison, I learned that a horror monster is seldom wholly unsympathetic; the

reader is always aware of the Gothic villains tortured mind and soul (4). This allowed me to

sympathize with and understand the main character in I Am Legend, Robert Neville.

Despite this class being a writing class, I was able to improve my communication and

collaboration skills across several media which include live presentations with visual

accompaniments, a video, and a website with my group. My group,The Grudges, and I worked

on several presentations together, one specific presentation being Monsters As Genres. I

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personally despise presenting anything in front of an audience. This assignment forced me to

practice presenting at home to my roommate in order to be able to do it in class. Although I did

not confidently present how I practiced, I was able to effectively communicate my portion on

examples of slashers in the horror genre. Through more presentations done in class, I slowly

gained more courage each time and tried to actually enjoy presenting. This lead me to be the

main actress in the film we created for the RIP project. This project especially taught me about

how important audience reception is because according to noted critic of aesthetics, Nol Carroll

states that the audience is to take reactions from the primary protagonist (52). I learned how to

communicate through acting. One of the things I learned was to exaggerate my actions because

there is no subtlety in acting when Im trying to communicate without words. Lastly, this website

I created for my eportfolio was probably the most difficult assignment in my opinion. It was

arduous going through the motions of having to learn how to use the website to be able to

communicate what I learned within the past 10 weeks. Each page was extremely time consuming

because I wanted to make the page appealing to the audience. Though reflecting back on

collaboration, I would say my group and I got along fine and worked well together; whenever we

split up work evenly amongst our group, it was done satisfactorily. Collaboration brought decent

ideas out from everyone, but I think forming it all together was the tricky part. For example,

when we were working on the idea for the RIP film, there were many proposals presented but we

had a hard time incorporating tropes and metaphors. In the end, we all effectively worked out a

solution together. All in all, my communication and collaboration skills expanded through

different mediums.

Writing my rhetorical analysis essay on the book I Am Legend written by Richard

Matheson improved my understanding of the conventions of scholarly writing and the

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importance of the process in drafting, review, and revision. Reading through Nol Carrolls essay

The Nature of Horror showed me how scholarly writing should look like. Scholarly writing

means the essay must use outside sources to support the claims made in it. It is targeted towards

someone who already has analytical eyes and is reading the essay to see if claims are argumental

and supported. I learned the three step method in class on how to effectively claim and support:

first introduce the source to establish credibility, second introduce the part of the source you are

about to analyze, and lastly present the passage to point and analyze. Though naturally, it takes

practice knowing how to adequately execute this method. This is the reason why drafting,

review, and revision is important. My first draft for the RA essay was terribly rough, I clearly did

not know how to state and support my claims, and one of my biggest problems was talking about

Robert Neville like he was a real person, not how Matheson portrays him to be. Through peer

revision, I was able to turn the essay 180 around into something I am now proud of. I realized

how beneficial peer review is, not only in the sense of a classmate peer reviewing my essay, but

also in that I peer reviewed their essay. Reading other peoples essays gave me more insight and

perspective as a whole in addition to finding myself taking my own peer review advice Im

giving to my partner. During the RA process, I was unable to meet with Mr. McClure and did not

get feedback on my essay whatsoever so it was an uneasy feeling turning it in, but I ended up

getting a B on the essay which did not prove to be too bad, so having the peer review definitely

showed me whether or not I was on track with how to properly write a rhetorical analysis.

There were many reflective assignments we had to do throughout this course, and that is

where metacognition painted my understanding through descriptive and detailed reflective

writing. The weekly response blogs especially exercised my understanding in the weeks

material. More specifically, in week twos response blog reflecting on Gaitskills writing along
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with the short film No Way Out, assisted me in remembering what I did for the week and

solidified my understanding in writing a thesis statement from the No Way Out exercise and

exploring different writing styles from Gaitskill in the horror genre (Wong). This last reflection

essay is also exploiting all the different things Ive learned this entire quarter. Im revisiting all

the assignments I have done and am recollecting all the things Ive learned and will continue to

use in life from this class.

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Works Cited

Carroll, Nol. The Nature of Horror. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol.46, No.1.

(Autumn, 1987), pp. 51-59. Print.

Magistrale, Tony, and Michael A. Morrison. A Dark Night's Dreaming: Contemporary American

Horror Fiction. Columbia, S.C: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Print.

Wong, Nelly. Week Two. Modern Horror. 22 March 2017. Web.