Writing Showcase

This page includes the process of me developing an essay that answers the course question:

How do Disney films contribute to the construction of society's values and norms about gender roles? Have these values changed over time?

Throughout the quarter, the class explored characters in Disney's princess series, Star War movies, and Marvel's movies with their appearances, actions and dialogues. I developed my essay based on the construction on the character Thor. The overall process is divided into 4 steps: the exploration of topic, peer review, self review and revision

Section 1:Planning and Exploratory Writing

Annotation

Defining toxic masculinity in my own word

This screenshot is taken from the

annotation on the article What is Toxic Masculinity written by Maya Salam. This is where I learned about the idea of toxic masculinity, which later becomes one of the key points in my essay. Doing this assignment really help me practiced the method of engaged reading, and by following the process, I was able to better understand the concept and idea from the author. For example, I was asked to read real tweets to connect them to toxic masculinity.

Exploration

Connecting Thor's scene with masculinity

This screenshot comes from my exploratory writing about the character Thor in the movie Avengers: Endgame. In my essay, I focused on Thor and his representation of masculinity traits to develop my thesis and ideas. During this assignment, I needed to pay attention to catch details of the characters I am analyzing and explain what gender roles are they showing. And I was able to learned the skill of focusing on details and hidden elements instead of story plot when watching a movie.

Section 2: Peer Review

I think the transition here should come a little earlier, about after you finished talking about Cinderella. I think you can use this transition to introduce Rapunzel and the corresponding movie and how she is different compared to Cinderella.

Me

I choose this review as my best advice given to one of my peers about her transitions in the body paragraph. I think transition is a very important part of the overall organization and it connects different ideas. I do feel that I understand the point my peer is trying to make and I am also certain that my advice can help her make her paragraph smoother. This also draws my attention to the my own transition in the essay and reminds me to check if the same advice works on my paragraph as well.

This is the best advice I received from the peer review about my explanation and analysis on scenes. As I was writing my paragraph, I felt that two scenes aren't well balanced and there could be some problems with it. With this review, I now knows how to improve and revise my paragraph to make it easier for the readers to understand and also makes my idea more clear. In addition, through reading other's review, I see the importance of them. It's hard for me to see my own issue by reading my own essay, but when others read it, they can point out those issues easily.

My peer

I thought the scene analysis was a little long containing unnecessary details that could be withheld to get your point across and the citations were confusing because they typically go at the end of the sentence with the period after it. I think to improve it, you should focus on one scene at a time and analyze them independently then connect the two at the end, which would make it less confusing and cluttered.

Section 3: Self-Review

Annotation on the introductory paragraphs

Intro

After reviewing my essay, I realized that I have to add more information to my introduction portion of the essay. As I wrote in my annotations, the difference between good masculinity and toxic ones should be informed in the introduction paragraphs. And when I develop my main idea in body paragraphs, I can went straight into connection between scenes and gender roles without explanation on masculinity traits.

Section 4: Revision

This is the revision I did according to the advice from my peer about my body paragraph. The problem she encountered is that I explain both scene at once and that makes it confusing and hard to understand. To fix it, I added the explanation to the first scene and how it will connect to masculinity. Compared to the older version, I think this one is more comprehensible and detailed and it should explain my ideas well.

This revision is done to add information to my introduction paragraphs. When I was reviewing my own essay, I realized that I wrote about information that weren't introduced earlier and it could very much confuse the readers. So I added a paraphrase from one of APA's first article that talked about masculinity to explain why some traits are considered as toxic. And in addition, I added one further idea into my thesis that I also covered in body paragraphs. With these information being added, they should help readers follow along with my explanation and understand my essay better.