WP1-James Coomber

Reflecting on previous works of writing.

James Coomber

September 4, 2023

Writing 340

Professor David Tomkins

Writing Project 1

Part 1: The Limitations of Writing in College

As a fourth-year student at the University of Southern California, I’ve encountered numerous writing assignments in college that were completed and submitted in exchange for grades. These projects were assigned in class by a range of different subjects: from science, to history, to foreign language, to English writing courses. The circumstances in which these projects were assigned and graded have many similarities and differences, which I will analyze now that I’ve been introduced to how the process and purpose of writing is quite different outside of the classroom. My perception of writing has always been based on the limitations inside of the classroom like following a rubric in order to produce a final product that my professors will ultimately read and grade. Now that I’ve been exposed to the real process of writing and publishing with fewer boundaries and rules surrounding genres and language, I can compare the differences of my own writing experiences in very limiting contexts and circumstances. 

One of the first writing projects that I was assigned in college was an argumentative essay for my Writing 150 class in which I needed to choose a social issue and take a position on one side. I discussed the issue of racial inequality and discrimination within the classical music industry. This particular writing project was very difficult for me to write because I had been used to writing the universally structured, five paragraph long, thesis-driven essays that were assigned throughout high school. I did not yet understand how to write college-level essays like that which my writing professor expected of me. I had started very much on track for this assignment, but then only days before it was due, I had a panic attack because I felt as though I needed to scrap the whole rough draft and start all over. My essay was not quite answering the difficult and vague prompt my professor had given us and I could not find good enough reasoning to support the argument I wanted to fight for. Since I was taking this class online during the pandemic, I was able to seek in-person help from my parents. They helped me calm down, gave me feedback, and helped me structure my highly unorganized rough draft so that I could turn it in on time. Their feedback and support made the writing process a lot easier on me because I had become too stressed and overwhelmed to efficiently write a good essay on my own. That experience leads me to believe that a very important step of the writing process is to seek feedback from other people around me to check for discrepancies in my work, which is something that many people do in the real world outside of school. Also, the circumstances of writing my first college essay with a short time constraint was a barrier that prevented me from writing my best work.

As a college student that has declared a science related field of study, lab reports are a genre of writing that I spend a great amount of time crafting after I complete my weekly lab experiments. Lab reports have generally had a certain structure to them, in which I must introduce the experiment and my hypotheses, explain the procedure in great detail, evaluate my experimental results, and make my conclusions in relation to the hypotheses and predictions. I wrote an extensive lab report on a physiological experiment analyzing the relationship between fitness levels in people and the efficiency of their heart using variables such as heart rate during peak exercise, time to return to normal resting heart rate, and hours of exercise per week. We worked together for the experiment to gather heart rate results from everyone in the class, then we were given a document that explains the step-by-step structure and layout of a universally styled lab report. The lab report is very different from the writing assignment discussed previously about discrimination in classical music because of the structure, content, and grading criteria. I was expected to use Microsoft Excel to create tables and graphs to include in the report for visual understanding of my results as well. The lab report was written during the same school semester as the argumentative essay discussed previously about racial inequalities in classical music, but I had a much easier time writing the lab report. The ability to rely on the data that I collected in support of my scientific hypothesis made writing this assignment a lot easier and enjoyable than the Writing 150 essay I had with the vague and confusing prompt. For the lab report, I knew very clearly what I must accomplish, which was to demonstrate that my experiment was valid and showed accurate results and conclusions. Additionally, having an experimental procedure provided for me and a step-by-step guide on the structure of a lab report made it so that I did not have to consult other people to proofread my report, because as long as I included all the information necessary, I would be able to get a good grade in this circumstance. 

Beyond all the writing I’ve done for schoolwork, I’ve also written a couple of cover letters and resumes for job applications. Because these genres of writing are not academic, they do not have rubrics along with them or grades that will come out of them. Instead, these were projects that I had voluntarily completed with the intentions of getting hired by an employer. A similarity between writing cover letters/resumes and writing the school assignments that I have previously discussed is that there are still feelings of anxiety concerned with being criticized, whether about job qualifications or about writing skills. In the process of writing the cover letters and resumes, I had help from my uncle and my parents, all of whom have had plenty of experience with job applications. Having the resources of my family members during that writing process was greatly helpful in making me look like a good candidate on paper for the jobs I’ve applied to. My family members provided recommendations in my writing that would make me look more professional or make employers want to hire me, which is knowledge I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Since cover letters and resumes are about the qualifications that I have for a certain position, it is easier for me to write in these circumstances than writing for academic research papers or argumentative essays assigned in school. I struggle more with writing papers for school because those genres are rarely about myself and my own accomplishments, but rather about some topic related to class material with which I do not have expertise.

After analyzing the circumstances in which my writing skills have been utilized since entering college, I have been able to identify what makes writing easy, enjoyable, and important to me. The situation in which I must complete the writing assignments, the people that influence my writing, and the content that I must write about are all variables that determine my overall experience of writing. Looking back at my writing classes, science classes, and even job applications while being in college, the genres of writing I completed depended on who was receiving them and what they were ultimately supposed to accomplish for me. For example, essays were to practice writing skills and earn a grade, lab reports were to practice the scientific method of research and experimentation and earn a grade, and cover letters and resumes were to show myself off as a good candidate for a job position. The limiting circumstances that surrounded these writing assignments are therefore what determined what was written, how it was written, and how I would rate my writing experience.

Part 2: My Paper About Flag Ceremony Rituals

One of the most important papers that I’ve written in my college career was an essay for my Sociology class about Flag Ceremonies being symbolic rituals in the Boy Scouts of America. I was a member of the Boy Scouts of America, starting from the age of eleven and graduating as an Eagle Scout at the age of eighteen. During my long scouting career, I participated in so many ritualistic flag ceremonies such as opening flag ceremonies, closing flag ceremonies, flag retirement ceremonies, and several other kinds. Later on, when I began my studies in college, I took a sociology class and was introduced to the study of human sociology and of ritual behavior. The flag ceremonies that I had participated in during scouting immediately came to my mind since they fit the definition of a ritual. In my sociology class, I was given a writing assignment in which I needed to choose some type of social event that I had previously experienced and then write an argumentative paper reinforcing why I think that event should be considered a ritual. I chose flag ceremonies for the thesis of my paper because I have a lot of experience that would serve as a great foundation for my argument for why they should be considered rituals. Although I was limited to writing within the genre of argumentative writing and the paper was written only for my sociology professor to read and grade, I still enjoyed writing this paper because it was an interesting exploration of myself in which I could redefine my past experiences in a sociological context. 

First, I explained a little backstory about my past being involved in the Boy Scouts of America and participating in many flag ceremonies. I reasoned that because of my own experience on this particular subject, I am qualified to make the assertion that flag ceremonies are rituals based on the definition of a ritual created by Émile Durkheim, who is often regarded as the father of sociology. Durkheim’s definition of rituals states that they are social events used to unite people or whole communities under common unifying beliefs of sacred things. I then go on to provide a long and detailed description of each of the different kinds of ritual flag ceremonies I was a part of during my time in the Boy Scouts of America. Following each description, I supported my argument with persuasive language and reasoning with the help of theoretical journals and other sources written by popular sociologists. The types of Boy Scout flag ceremonies that I analyzed in my paper were opening and closing ceremonies for our scout meetings, flag raising and lowering ceremonies each day at our summer camps, and flag retirement ceremonies. Throughout the essay, I also compared these flag ceremonies to other examples of ritual events such as Olympic opening and closing ceremonies and a large historical gymnastic performance under the Nazi regime. Comparing multiple other ritual events with the flag ceremonies supported my argument because it demonstrated that all of these events can be considered rituals since they all commonly represent the unification of people under a set of beliefs or identifications. For example, I wrote that flag-raising ceremonies held every morning at a boy scout summer camp demonstrates the scouts’ identification as Americans, members of the camp, and it also changes the status of the scouts to active members of camp during the day. Another example would be the flag retirement ceremony that I wrote about, in which a tattered American flag that was flown over the remains of the 9/11 terrorist attack was respectfully and properly burned so that it could be officially retired from its service. This ritual was meant to bring together people with common beliefs and nationalities, in this case Americans, and to commemorate the lives that were lost in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

I believe that the essay itself could be a great addition to the circulation of qualitative research and sociological literature if it were reviewed and edited to have non-assertive and open-ended language, rather than solely argumentative language. The unique reasoning and analysis of this paper could prove to be helpful for someone trying to understand the parameters of human ritual behavior, and they might be able to formulate their own thoughts and opinions on the topic. Within the context that it was written, the paper did what it was meant to do, which was to be graded by a professor. However, if I were so inclined to release this paper to the public discourse of sociological theory, I would want to write this paper using a genre besides argumentative. I think the intention of the essay would transform from persuading the reader to believe in my argument, to informing other curious minds of my own personal thoughts and experiences in an analytical call for reflection so that they themselves can make individual assumptions about whether or not flag ceremonies should be regarded as rituals.