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Hyun-Seung Christine Mun Dr. Lynda Haas Intensive Writing (Writing 37) 3rd December 2013 Reflection Essay As soon as I counted the eighteenth time that I have been slamming my forehead into my notebook computer keyboard, I looked up the white screen filled up with words in a sense of relief. I quickly scrolled up to the top of the essay to save, but my hand stopped for an instant as the date of the paper caught my eye. December came sliding in the door before anyone else in the class noticed, and the hot air of September cooled down with the leaves that were gliding on the cold dry air of winter. Alas, I was done with the quarter, and I was done with the Writing 37 course. Looking back to the progress that I have made, and what I have achieved from this class fascinated me every time I traced my steps. Of course, I was not able to finish every task on my own. I was able to accomplish them due to the help of my dedicated group members. The four of us came through various tasks such as presentations, making handouts, researching about a convention and many more. The class was separated into 5 groups, each selecting a film to analyze. Before that, we had to watch the film of George Romero, a director who assembled the main idea of classic zombies. Before we dived into our individual films and researched about each films zombie conventions, we had to watch the precedent idea of zombies and think how the genre had developed and evolved into a particular stage through time. Night of the Living Dead, by George Romero was the first film for us to watch in class. What we see nowadays as zombies, were not expressed how it was like then. It was shown more as cannibalism between humans,

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than the idea of undead creatures roaming about in the world causing an apocalypse to happen. With the film in mind, each group was assigned a film or a drama to watch and analyze for the first essay that was coming up, and preparing the presentation for the overall RIP Seminar that was held approximately a week ago. My room was assigned the drama called In the Flesh that was produced by Dominic Mitchell recently, in March. Overall, In the Flesh was extremely different to the other films such as 28 days later, Shaun of the Dead, or Zombieland because the main focus of the story was on the zombies, not the survivalists. Furthermore, the representation of the zombies were the sexual minorities, which also as related to the recent issue of gay marriage. Because the drama had so many unconventional factors compared to the conventional factors of the zombie genre, the first draft of the essay was very hard to write. The 4 of us in the group had very shallow conventions that were not adequate for analysis, and most of them overlapped. The fact that In the Flesh was taken on a revisionist strategy made our group think more about the zombie genre and had the chance to analyze the conventions even deeper than the other groups. The peer review process helped a lot composing the first genre essay. Especially, our group met again after class to talk about the revision strategies and what we should write about in the essay. The step by step process helped me organize my essays more and was able to generate an even more detailed draft than before. After the second revision and showing the second draft to another classmate other than the In the Flesh group, I was able to make the explanation even clearer, so that other people that does not know the drama was able to understand how it fits into the zombie genre. Since our first individual film was such a controversial film compared to the other groups, analyzing the second zombie genre novel of World War Z was much easier. I did hear, and know a bit about World War Z even before I got to open the book. I knew that there was a movie to the novel, like all the New York Times bestsellers. However, I

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was surprised to find out that the novel and the movie was 2 entirely different things. First of all, the novel did not focus on one character but in a total of 46 characters. Even though it was in such a form, it had a common topic or an event that connected all the characters. At first, because it jumped around a lot, it was difficult to keep track of where the interview was held, or who the interviewer was. However, due to the wide range of characters, we were able to pick certain characters and was able to analyze them deeply. Our group also like the fact that the peer review comments were directly in the essay unlike the connect module revisions because they were more convenient to see and follow. Dr. Haass comments helped me a lot, again. For the World War Z Rhetorical Analysis Essay, I wrote about how continuity works in the novel by Phalanx. I assumed that I didnt have enough analysis, but I was not certain where to start and how to fix. Dr. Haass comments directly pulled me out of the ground, and gave me a sense of how I should fix my essay. Unlike my first genre essay, I focused more on rereading the novel than doing more research. Organizing the adjectives that described the characters was what I focused on the most. I have more revising to do, but I was more confident than what I had to do for my genre essay. As the whole class was working on the two essays, we had to make presentations for the upcoming final RIP Seminar that we had to present to the other class. Our group had a total of 3 presentations to work on. One was about In the Flesh, one was a brief presentation about World War Zs author, Max Brooks. Lastly, we worked on the presentation about the 2 military characters that came out in the World War Z novel, Todd Wainio and Travis Ambrodisia. Working and practicing together as a group was easy, because everyone was very punctual about finishing their individual works and we met up frequently to pull our works together. Moreover, since we presented each presentation about 3 to 4 times, we got familiar to the whole material that we memorized our parts. Preparing for the seminar

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was not a hard job at all; all we had to do was revise the presentations so that they had more visual that words, and we had to cut down our time for the presentation due to the time limit. The finale that was held at November 25th went along smoothly. Our class was prepared, and our presentation looked better than the other classs presentation. All of us thought that our class did exceptionally well. As we ended our final seminar, we noticed that we were done with the quarter. In this class, I was glad that I had the chance to learn how a specific genre communicates to the audience. Also from the discussions, I was surprised to hear all the different perspectives from all the other classmates and had the chance to increase my depth in knowledge. The most important lesson I learned in this class was time management. Along with the different tasks from other classes, this class made me practice on how I should plan out my schedule in order to finish everything on time. It was certainly a challenging class to take in the first quarter of freshman year, but I do not regret on my decision of enrolling in this class.