Welcome to My Portfolio!!!
On this page, you will see four sections, Planning and Exploratory Writing, Peer Review, Self-Review, and Revision, to help create my final analysis essay, which answers the question “How do Disney films contribute to the construction of society’s values and norms about gender roles?” Also, there is a reflection of my progress towards the course objective.
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Planning and Exploratory Writing
Annotation from “What is Toxic Masculinity”
This is an annotation from Week 3 class reading practice: "What is Toxic Masculinity?" The highlights of this section briefly describe the characteristics of toxic masculinity. In my analysis essay, I analyze the dialogue, actions, and outwear that villains in Marvel films to illustrate their gender value, which is closely related to toxic masculinity. During annotating the essay, it "improve my written literacy, digital literacy, and overall communication skills across several media" and "develop habits for engaged reading." In each reading assignment, there is a strategy to guide me to fully understand the essay that starts with predicting the topic or specific term and ends with summarizing the whole idea of the essay. Therefore, when I read an article in the future, I will first understand the general idea of the article's author and then conclude the whole article.
Week 5 Exploratory Writing: Disney Superhero
The screenshot is from week 5 Exploratory Writing: Disney Superhero. It analyzes the dialogue, action, and look of leading heroes, Peter Parker, to effectively expresses heroes’ positive masculinity, which is one of the topics in my analysis essay. Exploratory writing for analyzing characters’ value is a good way to “understand and practice the conventions of academic writing in exploratory discussion posts and in a formal essay.” In exploratory writing, there are four characters we need to analyze and five summaries for those characters to illustrate their gender value. Thus, this kind of analysis is perfect for helping write a formal essay.
Peer Review
My peer review for Lesile Carrillo
This is the comment that I gave on one of Leslie Carrillo's body paragraphs. Since one of the requirements in the assignment, "writing body paragraph," requires us to analyze the selected scene and use secondary sources to prove the idea, I noticed that Leslie's body paragraph missed the part to analyze the scene, so I gave her suggestion on finding a second source to help analyze the scene and restate the characteristic that Mulan processes. Peer review helps me "Improve your peer review skills through practice" and "Understand the importance of peer review to your own reading and writing" since I can learn from others' problems or strengths to improve my essay.
Peer review of Jialin Mei from Brief outline
This is a comment I got from Jialin Mei on my Brief Outline. She suggested I include the color of uniform to analyze characters’ value and talk about their body shapes, which expands the scope of my task analysis. Therefore, I change my topic from the color of the uniform to the characters’ physical characteristics. Reading peer review that others gave me is an effective way to “understand the importance of peer review to my reading and writing.” Since other people give suggestions from the readers' perspective, every suggestion is the deficiency of the article and can be corrected. Therefore, others' comments can help to modify the article to a certain extent and make the logic more smooth.
Self-Review
Analyze organization for my analysis essay on Connect
When analyzing the organization of my analysis essay and combining the comment I get, I find that my topic sentence's scope is too narrow that I only study the color of characters' uniforms to illustrate their value. Therefore, I choose to expand the analysis of characters' appearance rather than just analyzing their color of the uniform. Since we need to do peer review on others' work and read the comment from peers and professors, we could easily notice what deficiency we still need to prove, so it's an effective way to revise our essay. Therefore, self-review is a way to "understand the importance of self-review" and be "responsibility."
Find and Replace Vague, General, and Unnecessary Words and Statements
In the process of writing, all of our text should stick to the topic, so we can delete some unnecessary words or sentences. In this article, there is no need to describe what happened in this scene in detail, but I just need to make a brief introduction. The primary purpose of this article is to analyze what gender value of the characters in this scene, so I should delete the description of the scene in my body paragraph. Therefore, I should revise this part by deleting the unnecessary scene. This self-review is an effective way to "understand the importance of self-review", which could effectively help revise the essay.
Revision
Before introduction
After introduction
The first part is the first draft of the introduction. After I read the comment from the professor, I switch the position of the definition of “social construction” into the beginning of the introduction and then introduce “kill us softly 4” to further explain how social media impacts the meaning of beauty in people’s mind. In this order, it enhances the logic of my paper. Peer review and self-review give us an effective way to revise the essay to make it more logical and have a better organization, so it’s essential to “understand the importance of having a process when you are composing a sophisticated text.”
Scene Before
Scene After
The left one is one of the scenes in my body paragraph, and it includes much detail in describing the plot, which is unnecessary. Therefore, I revise this part by deleting unnecessary plots and leaving the dialogue that the villain says. In this case, my paragraph's length will be shortened, and it can be more focused on analyzing the scene and characters. Before doing self-review, I try to shorten my essay, but I find I can't delete anything since it's essential for scenes. However, after I do a self-review, I realized that there is no need to describe what happens at that time and only to point out what the scene told readers about the gender role of characters. Therefore, this revision is a way to help me "understand the importance of reflection as part of the learning process through reflective blog writing."