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Mandy Meng
Dr. Haas
WR 39B
28 Aug 2014
Taking an adventure in Sherlock Holmes
I am not a fan of detective stories and movies, but it was a lot of fun for me to know and
learn about Sherlock Holmes and Mr. Conan Doyle. After reading all the articles about Sherlock
Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the detective genre, and watching BBCs Sherlock,
Sherlock Holmes, and Elementary, my curiosity of Sherlock Holmes was totally waken up. Not
only Sherlock Holmes but also the detective genre is a whole area that I am not familiar with and
I have nearly touched before. I wanted to know about these things desperately. This class gives
the learners the opportunity to experience something new.
Writing academic essays helps me to learn how to relate my personal understandings of
the articles that I have read to the examples from the films, and it also helps me to compare the
articles to find out the similarities and differences. For example, I have learned who is Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, the background of Sherlock Holmesthe Victorian era, the relationship between
Holmes and Dr. Watsonfriends and brothers, and that the biggest difference between the
detective genre and other genres is the role of the audiences or the readers: the readers participate
in the whole story with the protagonist: the detective. All this knowledge helps me to have a
better understanding of the novel and the films. I don't just read them like what usually do to
other novels. I look into the novel. Finding the sentences that I want to use from the scholarly
texts is what I have learned after reading the articles in the beginning weeks. While I was writing
the essays, especially after the exercises about quotation, paraphrase and summary, it becomes
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easier for me to find the information I wanted and use them correctly in my articles. Also,
reading while thinking about the examples from the visual resources is another skill that I have
handled after this class. Pairing the texts with scenes from movies and TV series can help the
students to use examples in their essays. Using the cinematic elements in the essays is a good
example to show this ability of the students.
Considering the characteristics of the detective genre and contents, it will not be hard for
me to study and analyze the characteristics of other genres in their future. Besides thinking about
the characters that are unique in either detective genre or other genres, the students learn the
similarities and changes of the different genres and contents. By learning about the history of the
development of the genre and reading about the good examples of the genre, the students can
easily transfer the method they used in this class to future studies. The analyzing of the detective
genre opens a new way for them to think about the world. In my future study about other genres,
I can look back to the history of its development and find out where this genre have started and
read the classic works of this genre, thinking about what is the similarities and what makes this
works different from others.
Personally, I will revise my literature review essay after comparing my two essays. I
choose this one because when I reread my title of the essay, I can still remember what I have
written. I think I have a better understanding of this essay than the second one. The strongest part
of this essay is that I use good examples from the films, and I include many citations from the
articles. However, the weakest part is also from my citations and examples. I didn't make a good
transfer between all the examples and sentences, and I didn't relate them close to each other. My
sense of creativity was still low at that time, but I will improve it. If I have enough time to work
on this essay, I would definitely spend more time to prioritize for revision, as this is my first time
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doing a literature review I want to do it well.
Comparing to the literature review essay, I don't want to fully revise the rhetorical
analysis essay. Even though this essay is required longer and I can have more space to develop
my essay, I still doubt myself whether I wrote the essay in the correct way. The paragraph I
chose for final revision is the second paragraph that I wrote about the beginning of the first
episode of Sherlock. In this paragraph, I have talked about how the convention is followed in
modern Sherlock Holmes films. I used too many words to describe about the scene but didn't
give them a complete explanation, and I didn't relate the example back to my topic sentence.
There are still many mistakes that I need to fix in this paragraph.
After I turned in my Literature Review and Rhetorical Analysis essays, I started to work
on my ePortfolio. This is a more-than-four-week project. I improved my persistence. I went to
work on my Portfolio very often to make it look better and more concise. I also need to be
creative when I built my ePortfolio. It felt good when I saw all my works were posted on my
Protfolio.
Thinking about the homework, it is necessary to mention Connect, which is a website for
the students to take grammar quizzes and find their language problems. Before taking Writing 39
series classes, I have taken a year classes of Academic English. I thought I didn't need to work
on my language problems anymore. The language and grammar problems were easy for me to do
and I can finish them very quick. However, not only quotation marks is a problem that I have,
I also realized that I have a big problem with MLA format. The website gave me clear
explanations every time when I was wrong, so I could learn from my mistakes. Also, the only
quiz that Dr. Haas assigned to us helped me realize that how bad I was about MLA format. I
have to pay more attention to it in my essays and in my future writing career.
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It is also an important part in the homework for the students work on peer review. This is
not the first class that asks the students for peer reviewing, but this is the first class that let the
students realize why they need to peer review. By peer reviewing, the students can compare their
essays with others: what parts are their weaknesses, and where they need to work on. In the first
wiki project about Victorian England, Benson Lim and I peer reviewed each others wiki page.
We had the same problem, which is safe, but our topic was different. His is about Victorian
Era, but mine is about Scotland Yard. After reading his first draft, I knew how disorganized was
my page, and I needed to work on my page with more effort. He gave me lots of good ideas
about where I needed to focus on and work on. Therefore, my final wiki page changed a lot
thanks to his help. Also, by giving Joyce Wangs and Bryan Hsus essay peer review, I knew
what problems their essays had, so I could pay more attention to the problems that appeared in
their essays in mine. Peer review is not doing some useless work but helping the students to find
out their own problems by looking for them in others paper works, as it is easier to find others
problems than their own.
Working on the wiki page was a good experience. Even though the students had never
met each other, my group members had very effective conversations. The first time I was
assigned with Ruby Park, Jungkyu Park and Gabriel Martinez. I created a Facebook group, and
our leader Ruby separated the works between us. I worked on the sub wiki pages, and make
questions to them. I have to say everyone in my group did a good job. We were all involved in,
and we discussed some points whether to use or not in the group. I increased the sense of
engagement. When Ruby and I worked on the first and second problems together, and I could not
find the answer for the second one, and she could not find the answer for the first one, we
decided to work on our problems separately. We adapt to the situation, and we finished the
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project early in order to live up to expectations. I practiced my flexibility in my group. After
Ruby working on the fifth question, Jungkyu worked on it again to develop more information to
it. I taught my members how to use the wiki page to add information and how to range the
pictures. We all took our own responsibilities and arranged our time, so we could communicate
with each other and stated out the problems each one of us have. Only with everyones
contribution and hard work can make this project finish fast and effective.
After the Victorian England project, I was assigned to Cinematic Elements project with
Joyce Wang and Bryan Hsu. After watching Stephen DaVega's video, I stopped watching for
entertainment and enjoyment. I began to consider how the camera is moved, how light is used,
and how the sound is recorded. This wiki project helped practiced my openness.
Learning new things with curiosity and an open heart, communicating with group
members and helping each other, the techniques to write essays are all what I have learned and
what I wanted to keep doing.
In conclusion, the topic of this class totally wakes up my curiosity. Using the cinematic
elements in essays helps me to think with an open heart because I see things a different way. By
working on the wiki page and peer review, I developed my engagement, responsibility and
flexibility. For this 10-week class in summer, I learned to finish things with persistence by
building my ePortfolio. Working on my essays ePortfolio enhances my creativity. This reflection
is a good way to understand what I have learned and how I became a better reader and writer in
process. This essay and all the revisions improved my Metacognition.