Professor Nadine Gordon,
This is the final component of my semester long project. I am writing this letter to you(as the name suggests) to reflect on this assignment, the compilation process and how the aims and objectives of this class align with the goals I have as a student and as a writer.
The build up to the final inquiry project was a long one. Writing a topic-proposal was difficult. I wasn’t sure what topic I was curious enough to spend several weeks researching. After much deliberation,I decided I wanted my inquiry topic to be about stereotypes. As my topic proposal indicates, I had too many questions about my topic and at the time, and could not decide on one question. While trying to narrow my topic down, I attempted to focus on stereotypes based on national origin since that was what my topic proposal was mostly based on. It didn’t take me long to find that the topic was too close to home for me to be objective. I was gathering sources that agreed with what I already thought which made my work seem one sided. To confirm my suspicions, I asked my mom(who is one of the best writers I know) to review my work and she said it was “a bit too much to the right” and I should “try taking a new perspective on it”. With that in mind, I focused my attention on another aspect of stereotyping. Assumptions based on race and gender. This was a sharp turn from my topic proposal , I had to consider sources that relayed different messages and my annotated bibliography reflected that. Assumptions based on race and gender play a role in my life as well but I found that I could be more objective in my research about those topics than I was while researching based on national origin. At this point, my inquiry question was where do stereotypes get their power from anyway? I planned to use stereotypes based on race and gender to answer that question.
Further down the line, I found that the answer to my question was simple. So simple in fact, that it answered no questions at all. I did a lot of research into the influence stereotypes have over modern culture. Although there were complex biological and psychological explanations to explain the existence of assumptions it all boiled down to one concept: faith in those assumptions.
“My initial inquiry was where do stereotypes get their power from anyway?I have found my answer to this question in one word, belief…. assumptions of any kind are only so powerful because it is actually believed and people use those assumptions to judge other people, situations and use them to make decisions everyday”.(Alabi, 2020)
Why was the answer so simple? I couldn’t wrap my head around it. So I decided to once more shift the course of my inquiry. In the introduction to my extended-inquiry-project I briefly mentioned the change my initial inquiry question undertook but not why. As a result of my dissatisfaction, I changed my inquiry to what are the origin of stereotypes because I felt that answering that question(which I attempted to do) would explain why stereotypes were so readily believed. I still wanted to answer my question using assumptions based on race and gender. Once I was finally done editing the question itself, I began to find ways to answer it.
Although it was initially bumpy, I did enjoy the research process. Finding sources that reinforced my ideas(by both agreeing with them or otherwise). It almost felt like being an employer at a job interview. ‘Interviewing’ these sources who were going to provide a foundation for my writing content. They had to prove to me(by the content) that they should be used in my project. This was especially complex because my topic deals with people’s opinions of other people and most of the time there are biases(both subtle and obvious) I had to be careful of the sources I chose. This is where my critical reading skills were utilized.
The exercise on analyzing Maus: A survivors tale (written by Art Spiegelman) helped me develop a consciousness and critical eye while reading. Examining the rhetoric decisions that Spiegelman took( e.g format, formality and tone) and the impact they had on the reader(read: target audience). In a similar way, I had to be conscious of the rhetoric decisions the authors of my sources made. I took into consideration the authors, target audience, length, depth and tone of the writing as well as how those decisions contribute to the message the writer is trying to pass across. In addition to all of that, I had to ensure the credibility of my sources by researching their authors and whether or not the source had been peer reviewed.
I definitely had to read some boring sources but the research process afforded me the opportunity to observe different perspectives and analyze how my own perspective differed from theirs. I wrote the annotated bibliography before writing the extended inquiry project and doing things in that order helped me map out what I had learnt from my sources and how it would shape/had shaped my writing. Keeping in mind what I had written in my annotated bibliography helped me use my different sources and different points to illustrate my points, claims and ideas in the Extended Inquiry Project.
When a writer reads his/her own work there is little or no objectivity. Peer reviews actually proved invaluable since I was getting feedback from eyes that were not my own and eyes that were part of my target audience. I got some feedback that the ‘tone’ of my writing came off as condescending or all knowing (which I obviously did not want). Keeping that in mind I went back over my writing, I did see some paragraphs where I seemed to be patronizing my readers (as if every other person spends their time analyzing 17th century craniology). I did make some changes to the approach and format that helped soften the tone of my writing. I also got some suggestions on the sequence of my Extended Inquiry Project. For instance, examining gender based stereotypes before stereotypes of national origin and race. This advice I did not take because I wanted the reader to appreciate the differences in origin but similarities in manifestation of stereotypes and assumptions.
Perhaps, the most important feedback of all came from you, that my essay lacked transition of ideas and that “undermined comprehension of the body”. I knew exactly what you meant by that. Because I wrote the EIP in stages, in different moods and levels of comprehension of my sources it had no”flow” and the information presented was not written in a sequential order(or in any order at all). During the final edit, I attempted to introduce each paragraph(read:idea) and explain how its content tied into the message I was attempting to pass across. Also, I had imposed my own interpretation on one of my sources: William Shakespeare’s sonnet 130. Which not only undermined my message about assuming but is an academic violation. I made sure to highlight that the analogy I used in my project was under scholarly debate and only a hypothesis I was using to demonstrate a point. So in the end, the reviews were invaluable and helped me make important changes to the draft. That experience really taught me the significance of letting others preview your work especially if they are part of the target audience.
Editing was a nightmare. I started to edit the draft of my Extended Inquiry Project on my e portfolio (this was what I thought you wanted us to do) . When I was done completely editing the draft I went back to the instructions and saw I had completely messed up. You wanted to actually see the draft, an instruction that had completely flown over my head. Luckily I had the draft in google docs, so I deleted the already edited version and transferred the original draft and then realized I had messed up again. I could have just changed the title of the edited one to final. I kept changing some sentences because of their structure I also added and deleted entire arguments when attempting to fix the pace of my writing . All these changes had to reflect in the marked changes and the final version. The fact that everything was meant to be in MLA format also skipped my mind till you reviewed it. Eventually, after reading the instructions severally I got the hang of it and understood what the assignment expected from me. It was a relief when I was finally done editing.
The most important link from this assignment to my aims as a student and a writer is a much better understanding of the importance and dynamic nature of process. This assignment( and this class as a whole) taught me that writing or learning doesn’t have to be 1,2,3 it could be 2,3,1 instead as far as everything is done and done well. In fact, doing things in an unorthodox sequence sometimes even provided more clarity. I came to that realization when writing my annotated bibliography first helped me understand my sources better and write the Extended Inquiry Project itself.
This was the first assignment I ever attempted writing using the free writing process and it was definitely an effective outlet for the expression of my ideas. It came in particularly useful when I was writing the extended-inquiry-project draft sometimes I was writing about the fact that I had nothing to write about but most of the time I came up with something substantial. The draft was very rough and had to go through several edits before it became the final version I submitted. But it provided me with some framework on which I built the final version.
Probably the biggest problem I had was falling into rabbit holes during my research.
I wanted a new perspective on my topic( as I explained in the first few paragraphs) so I began looking for the origins of stereotypes, mainly racial and sexual stereotypes. Through my research I found a concept I found fascinating called scientific racism. I fell very deep into that rabbit hole and then spent hours studying scientific racism and its historical significance. When I wrote my first draft( it was so awful I couldn’t even present it as a draft) I was only criticizing scientific racists like Linnaeus and others who agreed with him. I was writing with a one track mind and answered no questions. My writing was so convoluted even I could not figure it out and ended up scrapping that version all together. I had to rebuild the foundation of my inquiry and I did that successfully. Scientific Racism does play some part in my final version but I used it only to answer my question regarding the origin of stereotypes.
These were all problems that I had before going into this assignment. I worked on them as best as I could through this assignment but I am very much still aware of my shortcomings.
My most important work by far was the annotated bibliography. Although it is ideally only supposed to be used as an extensive sources page, I used the annotated bibliography as a writing tool. The annotated bibliography was the second thing I wrote ( second only to the topic proposal). My annotated bibliography was lengthy and probably discussed the sources in more depth than it was supposed to. This is because I used the annotated bibliography to explain to the reader( and myself) what I had learned from my sources. What part it played in my Extended Inquiry Project, why I chose the source and the rhetoric decisions I made based on those sources. My critical writing skills also made an appearance while penning the annotated bibliography and the Extended Inquiry Project. I had to develop a consciousness while writing those pieces and taking decisions that would affect the audience’s experience and subtly played a part in passing my message across( the length and depth of explanation, the conversational tone, the format of the direct quotes, the quotes I chose, the images I inserted into the document.)
In relation to the Student Learning Objectives of this class: Rhetorical Knowledge, Critical Reading, Composing Processes, Knowledge of Conventions, and Critical Reflection. I have definitely have a more detailed knowledge of the composing process and how a polished product should look. Also, my less than impressive critical reading and writing skills have greatly improved. A consciousness to detect rhetoric decisions and make some myself has also developed (as demonstrated by my annotated bibliography and the final version of my Extended Inquiry Project respectively).
To effectively sum up my experience and lessons from First year Writing, you should go through my e portfolio ,writing assignments and consider the experiences and lessons I highlighted throughout this letter to see how I have grown as a writer, student and thinker.
Citations.
extended-inquiry-project draft
Shattering stereotypes, staying unorthodox. 