Reflective Introduction
This document introduces you as a college-level writer, thinker, and communicator to a
community of your peers. Its fundamental purpose is to illustrate the role you have played in
your learning over the course of the quarter in 39C. You take responsibility for the quality of
your work in this document (and in your ePortfolio) by assessing your performance. The
reflective introduction is an analytically incisive, multi-modal composition that delivers
balanced arguments about your learning and supports them with carefully selected pieces
of evidence.
Guiding Suggestions for Writing the Reflective Introduction
➢ The reflective introduction should be an analytically rigorous multimodal composition that
documents the rich textures of your learning this quarter and perhaps throughout the WR39
sequence of courses (39A, 39B, and 39C).
➢ Think of the rest of your ePortfolio as an archive of evidence that you will use in support of
the arguments put forward in the introduction.
➢ Refer to the various pieces of evidence from the archival portion of the portfolio in the
introduction. Guide the reader to them and clearly explain your artifacts.
The reflective introduction should address and analyze your learning in the following four
areas:
1. Transferring What You Know
Guiding Prompts: You do not need to answer all of the following questions, select those you find
useful.
➢ Now that you are at the end of 39C (and the Lower Division Writing Requirement), take a
look back to where you were at the beginning of the quarter, or even at the beginning of your
college-writing experience, and analyze how your practices and habits of researching,
writing, and organizing have changed and evolved. You might consult your Week 1 SelfAssessment to get you started.
➢ How have your experiences in your writing classes at UCI influenced your personal history
as a writer in academic contexts? Has the WR39 series of courses and 39C in particular
influenced your ability to make effective choices about how to approach writing assignments
in other classes? Assignments such as lab reports, business memos, blue book exams, short
response papers, and any other examples of writing you have been assigned in here at UCI?
In other words, have you applied what you learned in the WR 39 series to writing
assignments in other classes? Have other classes and assignments influenced your writing
process; if so, which ones? Please explain using specific examples.
➢ Are you using a variety of different strategies to approach your writing assignments in all of
your classes? Are you using the same strategies in different contexts as you consider the
demands of different situations and assignments? If so, please explain such situations and
assignments, and give examples.
➢ Over the course of this quarter, while you were in WR39C, did you bring any of the
strategies you were learning in 39C into the other classes you were taking this quarter to help
you with writing assignments in these other classes? Please explain, and use examples.
➢ Did you bring strategies you learned in your other classes this quarter into 39C? Please
explain, and use examples.
2. Your Composing Process
Guiding Prompts: You do not need to answer all of the following questions, select those you find
useful.
➢ Your Writing Process: Describe the central strategies of your writing process. When and how
did you learn them? How have they changed over time and what experiences have been most
influential to you? How do you expect to use them in WR39C? Explain and use examples.
➢ Have you experienced moments when the light bulb suddenly illuminated? Can you explain
why and how this happened?
➢ Explain what you have learned about the process of generating a research-based composition.
➢ What have you learned about arranging the elements of your compositions? Have you
become more skillful and able to control your presentation of evidence and integrate various
pieces of evidence into a coherent and meaningful argument?
➢ How did conducting research all throughout the drafting process help you to make decisions
about the organizational logic of your compositions? In what ways, specifically, did you
formulate and reformulate research strategies, framing questions, and guiding
claims/arguments by using research?
➢ Did you carefully select multimodal pieces of evidence? Why did you choose such
examples? Did making your argument visible by using multimodality help you to clarify
your thesis?
➢ Explain how your process of writing drafts, source evaluations, and annotations evolved over
the course of the quarter. Did you become more effective at pre-writing tasks?
3. Rhetoric, Argumentation, & Multi-modal Communication
Guiding Prompts: You do not need to answer all of the following questions, select those you find
useful.
➢ What have you learned about argumentation and persuasion through the process of
generating two multi-modal compositions?
➢ Explain how creating a multi-modal composition helped you to articulate your arguments and
understand your ethos as the author.
➢ How did conducting research all throughout the drafting process help you to make decisions
about the organizational logic of your compositions? In what ways, specifically, did you
formulate and reformulate research strategies, framing questions, and guiding
claims/arguments by using research?
➢ Did you carefully select multimodal pieces of evidence? Why did you choose such
examples? Did making your argument visible by using multimodality help you to clarify
your thesis?
➢ Can you explain how you arrived at the solutions you chose to analyze in your advocacy
composition?
➢ Was there a specific moment when your thesis became clear to you, when the light bulb
illuminated, and can you explain what you did to arrive at such a moment of clear insight?
➢ Did using multimodal elements help you figure out how to arrange your evidence and deliver
your argument in a well-put together narrative?
➢ Explain and demonstrate why and how you used various arguments and counter-arguments
and numerous and different sources to strengthen your claims.
4. Revision
Guiding Prompts: You do not need to answer all of the following questions, select those you find
useful.
➢ Explain your process of revision. How big of a role does revision play in your process of
generating and discovering arguments?
➢ Explain how you benefitted from feedback from your teacher and from your peers both in
workshops and in office hours. How do you respond to criticism? What sort of critic are you
becoming? Use examples of feedback you received on your work-in-progress, your final
versions, and in workshops, as well as advice you gave to your peers to address these
questions.
➢ Analyze how you benefit from writing multiple drafts in terms of argumentative presentation,
evidentiary support, and narrative development.
➢ Explain and analyze the types of revisions that benefit you. Do you make broad, conceptual
revisions? Do you make structural revisions and reorganize paragraphs? Do you rewrite
sentences? Do you make fine word choices? Do you alter your body of evidence through
research or omission?
