My Writing Development
In this segment of my personal blog, I will be talking about my progression in developing my Ideas to answer the course question, How do Disney films contribute to the constructions of societal values and norms about gender role? I will be also be reflecting on how I have my progress has reflected upon using the course objectives of WR39A. I will be analyzing my essay and further show the planning of my essay.
Planning and Exploratory Writing
The assignment in the picture is an article annotation that was called " Masculinity- Marvel Style written by Matt Cates. This source goes further in analyzing each male superhero that has been introduced in the MCU and depicts masculine traits. The work I am featuring is an excerpt in which Cates is talking about Tony Stark. This source relates to the course objectives because by annotating this source I am further working on my communication skills, in doing so I have learned that many coveted characters may have a bigger implication in today's cultural values. Looking at the highlighted and annotated text, this source made it clear that certain male heroes like Iron Man portray negative masculine traits that in some sense is accepted because of the idea that "boys will be boys." This encourages men to act in a certain way that influences theirs adulthood. In this sense Tony's, challenges made him the masculine hero he was. This idea of Toxic masculine traits influenced what I was going to write about because I found it interesting that characters like Tony, portray the cultural values that harm men. In conclusion this excerpt encouraged me to look at a superhero that relays negative masculine traits and it led me to Tony Stark himself as my topic of my essay.
(Week 5, close reading:Cates, Masculinity, Marvel-style)
The second source that helped me develop my ideas was the expository writing assignment on Marvel superheroes. Once I started this assignment, I had set my mind to looking at a male superhero that establishes a sense of masculine traits. In this assignment I chose The Hulk because I wanted to look at the broad array of male characters and pick one that may portray in some way, "toxic" masculine traits. What other character isn't better than the green rage monster, the Hulk himself. Since I read the previous article above this text, In some sense I had my mind set at talking about "toxic" masculinity in the Marvel franchise. The course objective that I used in this source was applying my analysis from a previous article to connect to this assignment. When analyzing The Hulk in the movie, The Avengers:Endgame it showed me how toxic masculinity comes in many forms. For instance in The Hulk inability to accept his defeat after fighting Thanos expresses the inability to accept defeat because in todays society it is not manly to loose. Bruce Banners inability to transform into The Hulk only showcases the negative aspect of masculine values in which one must always be the toughest and strongest no matter what occurs. Analyzing The hulk made it possible for me to look at different make heroes and open my mind to what I was going to talk about in my essay.
(Week 5 Exploratory writing: Disney superheroes)
Peer Review
This is the advice that was given to be by Abigail Rose, who revised on of my body paragraphs. To briefly explain what she said in this picture is that there weren't any secondary sources found on the paragraph that she was analyzing thus recommending to add one. The reason why I choose this recommendation is because my essay did lack inputing secondary sources so I found this very helpful when looking back at my essay. Her feedback made me realize that I have to put a secondary sources in at-least most of my body paragraphs. One of the course objective does a good job in stating that as writers we must improve our peer review skills. In the sense that we are able to analyze other conceptual text of our peers but further improve our writing by taking positive criticism and using it to better my writing skills.
(Week 9 Body paragraph revision)
The Image below is an excerpt of the advise I gave a peer about their thesis and outline for their essay. The name of that person is Shiwei Hu. His outline was based on the Marvel superhero, Captain America and how is a good symbol of masculinity. So in this assignment we had to peer review the thesis and outline of colleague to let them know on what they could improve on. The one review that I am going to be looking at would be the outline review. The reason why I believe that this was one of the best advice I gave was because I didn't just insist that he had to change things from his outline to make his ideas less vague but I as well showcased what he did well in the his outline. I believe advise should be used to help one another but in some sense showcase the good things that they did as well so that they are motivated to keep on improving. Peer revision is related to the course objective that states one should improve on peer review through practice. In this sense I am fulling this objective by peer reviewing my colleagues ideas.
(Week 8 revision of Thesis & Brief outline)
Self-Review
In this self-review annotation I am talking about the sentence in which indicate a small arrow on top. When reading this sentence in my self review I noticed that I had three resources explaining the same idea, so because of this I thought that I could either cut that last sentence or input it somewhere else in the paragraph. This was my first body paragraph, so I made it clear after reviewing this sentence I would need to take it off completely. By acknowledging my error I am learning the importance of self-review, as being one of my course objectives. Self-reviewing my essay improves my skills but by reading it with the lenses of analyzing my mistakes I am able to catch my mistakes as I did not before.
(Week 9: Self-review full essay)
This self revision was implemented in my second body paragraph. In this paragraph I state the idea that Tony Stark inhibits a "lone wolf" facade but I do not clearly state what I mean by a "lone wolf." In that sense my revision expressed adding a description to let the reader understand what I mean by "lone wolf" characteristics. When I self-reviewed my essay, it was clear that some idea like this would be better understood if I were to put a more descriptive understanding about this term I am using to define Tony Stark. This yet again corresponds with a course objective and that is practicing self-revision is going to make me a better writer because I am sharpening my skills.
Revision
The revision that I made was in my introduction paragraphs. In this picture, the highlighted blue segment is my previous thesis and in the highlighted greed segment is my new thesis. The reason why I revised my thesis is because after checking the comment that I got from Dr. Haas I realized that my thesis was to vague so I choose to take her recommendation in changing the thesis by using the example she wrote down, when commenting to my thesis and outline assignment. After reading my thesis once again Dr. Haas was right my thesis did need some improvement.
In these two pictures I am showcasing my first introduction paragraph. What I did to change my this paragraph was to cut unnecessary information while inputing secondary sources to my writing has some reliability to them. The reason why I revised this paragraph was because when I read over this, it seemed to have to much information to the point where I was repeating myself, so to work on the structure of this introduction paragraph I revised it and cut the unnecessary information while adding information that was needed to make this a more concrete paragraph. It is much better in the sense that I fixed the structure and content of my paragraph while adding information that was needed.
Before
After
