Reflective Essay

Throughout the semester, this class has allowed us to explore various genres of writing, and make goals for ourselves to improve.  We have also been given very specific goals for the genres of writing and the class as a whole, which helped to direct our focus for each assignment and ensure that we could write in the genre even if it was unfamiliar.  I feel that the combination of these goals and the feedback we received from our peers and the instructor aided me in improving my writing and broadening my view of the different types of writing I could encounter in my profession.

The first assignment we were given was to analyze the discourse in our field by choosing a document in our field of study and assessing how the language and form of this document exemplified the field’s rules for discourse.  I chose a paper written about “serious games,” a subsection of game design that focuses on games for education and social impact.  The paper I wrote was received moderately well by my revision club partners, however it seemed that I hadn’t been careful about my placement of block quotes in my essay, and I ended up submitting a rough draft that had some sections out of order.  Having this pointed out by my revision club partners made me realize that I needed to take greater care in organizing my essays for the future.  This is an important concept to consider because the organization of an essay, and the evidence presented in the essay, can impact the clarity of the paper.  My strategy at the time had been to read through the article I was analyzing to find specific passages I wanted to quote, and label these passages A through Z as I found them.  I wrote the body of the essay that analyzed the quotes in a document, and inserted the actual quotes later on.  This strategy may not have worked for me, as it caused me to misplace entire quotes and put them in the wrong place.  It already caused trouble in a paper that used five block quotes, and I couldn’t imagine the trouble it could cause for longer essays with many quotations scattered throughout.  After receiving this feedback, I decided to change my strategy, and instead of inserting quotes after the entire paper was already written, I would insert them as I was writing to keep better track of where they were.  This helped me keep track of where I was in the paper at all times, and writing the paper chronologically instead of writing the sections out of order helped maintain the flow of the paper.

For the second assignment, the genre was incredibly different than the first paper.  Writing a reference document seemed easy to me at the time, but I learned that it was more difficult than I had expected.  I chose to remain in the game design field for this assignment, and wrote a manual about how to import a background into the game engine Unity and format it for a 2D game.  One piece of feedback I received for my rough draft was that I assumed too much knowledge on the part of the reader at times.  My partners both specifically questioned a statement I made about something called “lineart,” where I suggested that “the final lineart go on a separate layer, always at the top, and all color go on a separate layer or a series of separate layers underneath the final lineart in layer order.”  I had neglected to mention what the word “lineart” meant because I assumed my audience would know what it was, but because my assumption was incorrect, my partners had trouble understanding this statement and any other instance in which it was mentioned.  This taught me that I couldn’t always assume that terms I am familiar with are familiar to others, and that there are ways I could briefly define terms like this to aid my audience’s understanding.  When I revised my essay, I made sure to change this section, so it read instead “Once you sketch out your final design, it is time to create the lineart for it.  Lineart is the ‘final sketch’ of your background and platforms, the lines that you will see on the finished product.”  This seems to have helped my readers understand what lineart was, and therefore understand the instructions being given.  I felt that this was an important lesson because, as a game design major with background in both programming and art, I knew that there would be times where the two subsections of my field would not overlap, and my readers could get confused.  In a field as diverse as game design, it is sometimes necessary to explain the terms and phrases I use so anyone in the field can access the information in my paper.

The third assignment gave us a choice of various genres, from which I chose to do an op-ed.  My subject was feminism in game design, focusing on the gamergate scandal in some parts.  Due to the sensitive nature of my topic, my partners seemed to have a bit of trouble assessing my paper, as it would have meant trying to come up with a valid counterargument to feminism, which they did not feel comfortable offering.  However, despite this difficulty, I felt that I was given good advice for addressing this in the paper.  My revision club partners both suggested that I address the counterargument in some way, even if it was only to refute it and assert my own opinion.  I used this advice to add a counterargument to my paper, which is critical for an op-ed and which I did not previously incorporate.  Besides this, there were other edits I made between my rough draft and final draft that I feel improved the piece overall.  In my rough draft for this paper, I stated “women in the game design industry aren’t exactly rare, but it is still obviously a male dominated field,” however I never gave statistics to back this claim up.  One of my revision club partners suggested I back up this statement, and so for my final draft I changed this passage to say

“Women in the game design industry aren’t exactly rare, but it is still obviously a male dominated field, and the women in the field are painfully aware of this.  As of January 2013, it was reported that only 11% of game designers are women, and only 3% of programmers are women.  The women in these positions tend to make between $10,000 and $12,000 less than their male counterparts.”

Similar to the issue with my second paper, I hadn’t realized that some of the claims I made were not common knowledge.  Making this fix helped me realize that I not only need to define terms and phrases for my readers, but also back up any claims or generalizations I make, and not just assume that the reader will be familiar with any of that information.

The fourth paper of this semester was a literature review, a format I was somewhat unfamiliar with, yet was similar enough to research papers I had written that I felt more comfortable writing this paper than any other paper this semester.  It seems that what I had to work on the most for this paper, besides adding and organizing content, was transitioning between topics.  I had assumed that organizing the paper into sections, which came to mind after reviewing my first paper again, would take care of most of the transitions for me.  However, I still felt compelled to have each section lead into the next in some way.  For example, in my first draft, I ended the second to last paragraph in a section with “The researchers involved in the project believe that the game will be successful because it combines their knowledge of game design with their knowledge of this therapy, which means that the game will play like an actual game instead of a more bland color or shape recognition program.”  This could have ended the section there and gone to the next section, however I then added a small paragraph beneath this paragraph, starting off by saying “Perhaps the most well known system for motion control, and even one of the most well known game systems of all time, is the Nintendo Wii.”  My revision club partners pointed out that this paragraph felt sudden and out of place when compared to the passage just before it, and advised that perhaps I did not need these transition paragraphs between sections and subsections after all.  In my final draft, I ended up combining that transition paragraph with the introductory paragraph of the subsection that followed, which reduced some of the awkward text and made for a much smoother transition.  We had learned about transition statements and phrases previously, but I had experienced a few issues applying this concept to the assignment.  After hearing my partners’ feedback, it was made much clearer to me how to transition between ideas when those ideas are already broken up into sections.

I feel that the feedback I received helped me evolve my writing into a more professional style, and a style that more readily fits in my chosen field’s discourse community.  By taking the feedback I was given during each assignment, I learned better strategies for writing for a specific audience, and imparting knowledge effectively.  I believe I met all of the learning goals for the course as described in the AWD Toolkit, and that my drafts and the changes I made after receiving feedback for each assignment will reflect this.

On a final note, I would like to acknowledge the people who helped my writing improve during this course.  I would like to thank my revision club partners for each assignment for their detailed feedback and advice on how to improve my rough drafts (specifically: David and Nikita for assignment 1, Konstantin and Michelle for assignment 2, Michael and Calvin for assignment 3, and Martha and Ian for assignment 4).  I would also like to thank Professor Akbari for providing constant feedback both in class and in formal reviews of our work, and for making the class interesting and challenging.

Please click the buttons below to download the word document of this essay and my self assessment.