Ryan Gonzales

Professor Lynda Haas

Writing 39C
2 June 2015
A Step into New Knowledge
I still remember hearing the rumors of Writing 39C. Fellow students and peers would tell
me the stories of how difficult the class is. When I would ask why, I would get a vast amount of
responses ranging from workload to content. However, within all of these responses, I began to
see an ongoing trend.
My experience begins a bit strangely. I was waitlisted in Professor Haas Writing 39C
class and had another professor for the time being. I started to get to know everyone within the
class and prepare for the material Week two of the quarter, I finally received a spot in Professor
Haas class. Although I previously had Professor Haas for writing 37, I entered this new class
unfamiliar and nervous.
As we went through the syllabus, seeing projects such as the historical conversations
project and the advocacy project did not stimulate my interest for the class nor did it calm any
rumors Ive been hearing. I realized that, I was afraid of all the new things I would be
encountering this quarter. I would be working harder and would have to change many of my
ideas I was used to. This is the trend that I realized that most people were going through. Writing

39C teaches students how to think differently and to learn new methods in writing. Many people,
including myself, were afraid of the change that they would have to go through.
From day one, we were assigned to a group of three to four people. My group consisted
of Calvin Belcher and Tyler Kurokawa, two people I have never met. Since our class topic was
on non-human animals, our project was to do research on a specific area of animal cognition and
give a presentation on what we found. We were assigned to do research on animal intellect. Right
away, I was completely intimidated. I just met the members in my group and now we had to rely
on one another to get this difficult project done. Our first draft of our presentation only further
amplified the difficulty of the class. My group and I were very shaky with our presentation.
Presenting the level of research we had to do was something very unfamiliar to me. We realized
that we would have to engage more into our learning in order to present something meaningful.
Therefore, we decided to meet up again to really figure out how to do the presentation.
We rearranged our powerpoint and expanded our knowledge on our topic. We began to have
better structure, organization, and coherence with our research. Ultimately, we were able to
shorten our presentation to the required length and give a far better presentation on our second
run. My group and I all found the importance of being responsible in group projects. Doing your
own tasks and duties is very important in completing a project and finishing it efficiently.
After completing the first group project, the class jumped into the Historical
Conversations Project (HCP). This six to seven page paper had us individually do a literature
review on historical research from numerous scholars on non-human animals. I decided to do my
research on how dogs positively affect their owners. The reason I chose this topic is because of
my past experience of adopting a dog and having it being part of the family. I observed that my

family had a lot of positive experience from owning a dog. I wanted to see scientific research
that further elaborated on why exactly dogs bring such happiness to families. It peaked my
curiousity.
My first draft of my HCP was very rough. Generally, there was a lot of formatting and
coherence issues. For example, I wrote,
The chart on the right shows the amount, in millions, specific household compositions
spend on their pets. What matters from this chart is not necessarily the compositions, but
rather the amount spent. This shows that many owners feel responsible for their pets and
are willing to buy the necessary items to care for their pet. In terms of financial changes,
responsible owners have to consider their charges on a pet. Nevertheless, financial effects
is not quite as prominent as emotional effects.
An evident problem here is that I referenced to a chart on the right. In MLA formatting, the
writer is supposed to label each multi-modal element as a cited figure. Instead, I referred to
charts according to the texts current position. This paragraph in general had no coherence with
the rest of the essay. I tried to explain how the amount of money spent on a pet is how much the
owner cares for the pet. This logic made no sense without any scholarly research to augment the
point.
In my final draft of the HCP, I prioritized to give everything coherence and to properly
format everything according to MLA guidelines. An example of adding coherence is how I
supported the money spent on pets claim. I wrote,

This idea can be explained by veterinary population health researcher at the University of
California, Davis, Lynette A. Hart's findings. The book, The Waltham Book of Humananimal Interaction: Benefits of Pet Ownership, contains Hart's essay, "The Role of Pets in
Enhancing Human Well-being: Effects for Older People." Hart states, "The widespread
ownership of pets among people of various ages and the effort and money spent on behalf
of pets suggests that a majority of owners derive a significant benefit from their
companionship" (19). The significance of Hart's findings is that it shows a correlation
between responsibility and companionship. As owners develop a greater bond with their
pet, they begin to feel more responsible for them.
I felt that adding this research example gave a lot of coherence to the idea. Harts idea relates the
money spent on pets to how owners feel about their pets. Also, to give an example of improving
formatting, I labeled the previous mentioned graph as Figure 2. Average annual expenditures on
pets by household composition. www.bls.gov.
The HCP was extremely difficult. However, I learned a lot of new writing techniques
because of it. The one technique I learned that I never touched on prior to this paper was
multimodal elements. These elements are things that are non-text based that help augment the
research and ideas. This can include infographics, pictures, or even videos. I decided to use
primarily infographics and pictures since I used a lot of statistics to enhance my points.
Multimodal elements gave me a new creative aspect in writing research essays.
After the completion of the HCP, our class moved on to new groups. My new group
consisted of Dylan Green, Erik Manzano, and Jocelyn Yang. Our new group project had us run a
social media campaign through three online platforms. The social media campaign project was

focused on practicing advocacy for the upcoming advocacy project. Our group had to choose an
ongoing problem in the non-human animal community, frame the problem, and advocate a
solution. My group and I decided to choose the topic of euthanasia in animal shelters.
Our campaign was titled Save Mr.WoofWoof and Mrs. MeowMeow. We decided to
choose a story-based campaign in order to give a unique, relatable perspective on the ongoing
problem. The story focused on a dog, Mr.WoofWoof, and a cat, Mrs. MeowMeow. The two
companion animals were taken away from their families and put into animal shelters. The
campaign focuses on their experiences within their shelters and the problems that go on within
them.
We advocated our campaign through facebook, twitter, and youtube. Facebook served as
our home-base of operations while twitter and youtube augmented the entire campaign. We had
daily post on facebook, everyday for a week, that explained where exactly the two animals were
and how they were doing. Each day, we focused on a certain topic such as animal adoption,
fostering, and volunteering. We provided links that gave more information on our topics and
used youtube to show real-life examples. Twitter was used as a first-person perspective of the
two animals. We saw that having a first person perspective would help with our pathos appeal
which we feel was lacking from youtube and facebook alone. The last day, we wrapped up our
campaign, ending the story of Mr.WoofWoof and Mrs.MeowMeow. They both escaped the
shelters through adoption. I also created a video that visually displayed the conclusion of the
story.
My group was very solid in their work. I had a great time working with them. However,
we did have some scheduling issues due to all of our busy schedules. Therefore, we had to learn

to be flexible with our time. I learned from this project that social media campaigns are very
difficult to run. The reason for is that the team has to be very active in order to get more
followers of the campaign. People will not just come to you, you have to come to them.
After completing the social media campaign, we moved straight into the advocacy project
(AP). The advocacy project is considered the big project for writing 39C. This project
demanded everything we knew about writing and asked us to either change what we know or
expand more on it. The basic prompt of this project was to find a problem within the non-human
animal community, use our historical conversations project as a literature review for that
problem, frame the problem, talk about the ethical and philosophical aspects of the problem, and
advocate a micro and macro solution to the problem. The final paper had to be at least 10 pages
and had to include multimodal elements. I decided to focus on the problem of animal euthanasia
within animal shelters.
Our required first draft was a three-page draft that had us frame the problem. There was
not much issue with this draft besides just finding a problem to focus on. The second draft was
required to be seven-pages and had us expand more on our first three page draft. I had quite a lot
of trouble writing this draft. My main problem came from writing my literature review. Since we
were supposed to link our historical conversations project with our literature review, I had
trouble trying to link two completely different topics. Basically, my HCP dealt with how dogs
positively affect their owners while my AP focused on animal euthanasia. For example, my
problem in the AP is introduced with:
When one thinks of animal shelters, the words salvation, sanctuary, and care may come to
mind, and this is understandable, because shelters do practice these important activities.

However, these places are not shelters for all animals. According to the American
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), 7.6 million companion
animals enter United States shelters every year.
I had to think how exactly I would relate it to my HCP which is introduced with:
According to the American Pet Products Association (APPA), about thirty-seven percent
to forty-seven percent of all households in the United States own a dog, which is
approximately seventy to eighty million. This settles the dog as the third most popular
pet in America behind the freshwater fish and the cat (Figure 1).
These are two completely different topics that I had to find a relation in. Since I had a lot of
trouble figuring out how exactly I would do this, I contacted Professor Haas to get some insight.
Through a conference, we talked about how to find coherence between my HCP and AP. What
the professor recommended was something that took some thinking outside of the box. Since
scientific research shows that pets give great benefits to their owners and that humans have
interfered with their evolutionary track, it would be immoral for humans to euthanize an animal.
Humans have a moral responsibility for these companion animals and have no justification for
killing them. It was definitely a large stretch to go by, but it ultimately gave me a base to give
coherence throughout the rest of the essay.
The micro solution I advocated was to get people to adopt or foster an animal or
volunteer at shelters. This way, people would be taking animals out of shelters and improving
their lives within the shelters respectively. For my macro solution, I used a campaign that
Professor Haas recommended to me that was ran by the People for the Ethical Treatment of

Animals (PETA). This campaign focused on stopping the issue of animal euthanasia before it
even begins. Basically, overpopulation is the main cause for shelters having to euthanize animals.
PETA believes that controlling overpopulation will ultimately eliminate the need to euthanize
animals. Their campaign focuses on getting the government to intervene. They want the
government to enact a law to control animal overpopulation.
We can wipe out animal homelessness by working together to strike at the root cause,
including by lobbying for laws that have been proved effective in reducing unplanned
births and shelter intakes in communities that enforce them and by developing low-cost
or free sterilization programs for dogs and cats in every community. In other words, by
stopping animal homelessness before it starts. -PETA
The advocacy project required me to be persistent and open minded in order for me to finish. A
ten-page paper that demanded new ideas is very difficult to complete without being persistent. I
had to always find something new and interesting in order for me to continue on with the project.
After listening to the professors advice, I realized that I had to really keep an open mind. Having
to think outside the box made me realize that there are many ways to approach essay topics. I
had to always find the possibilities to continue having coherence in the paper. Overall, I learned
from this project a new way to write scholarly essays. I have never written anything like it and
will carry on everything I learned to later papers.
For me, there was a lot of change this quarter in writing. There was so many new things I
learned this quarter that no other writing class has taught me. From multi-modal elements to
writing advocacy-based papers, this quarter in writing was filled with new experiences. I learned
that I should not fear change and challenge like the many who took the class before me. Instead,

I should stay open-minded and find something new and interesting to further expand my
knowledge. Taking the writing 39 series with professor Haas has taught me so much. Through
the class and through the professors teaching, I know I have grown as a writer. Though it may
come to a surprise, the greatest idea I learned from writing was the importance of
metacognition, the ability to reflect on your own learning and understand where you are in
your process of becoming a better writer, reader, and overall communicator. Without it, it is
very difficult to improve. We improve by learning from our mistakes and reflection helps us
identify our mistakes. As long as we accept our mistakes and fix them, we will always get better.
Without reflection in the writing series, I do not think I would have ever improved as a writer.
This is perhaps the one of the greatest things we have been taught in writing. I hope to continue
developing as a writer and to grow over the years.