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Dan Ho
Ali M. Meghdadi
Writing 39C Section 33337
14 March, 2015
Reflective Introduction
I have been creating music ever since I was young. At age seven, I was beginning piano
and learning how to read notes. At age ten, I began playing violin in my first orchestra. At age
fifteen, I gave my first solo performance. Music is a big part of my life, but it is not simply not
just the music that I create that resonates within the chambers of my mind it is the intricacies
and life lessons that music provided me that motivate me today to continue pursuing music and
life through the eyes of a musician. Certainly anyone can learn their life values through different
mediums. I was simply chosen to use music as a tool to understand life. And if there is one thing
that music has taught me, it is that becoming better at something comes through diligent
research, hard work, practice, and emotional investment. It is these values that propel me today
and make me the person I am. Because I am a musician and see the world through these lenses, I
apply these methods of practice and betterment to everything in life. This process can clearly be
seen through throughout my work in Writing 39C.
I was not always as diligent of a writer as I am today. I did not start using this
methodology, really, until I reached college. And this was because high school writing was not
as rigorous compared to the curriculum and pace of college writing. In high school, I was the
one-draft-wonder. Most of the time, we were not required to submit drafts for any major papers.
So I took advantage of this and my apparent knack for writing decent first drafts. This method
was able to get me through high school with As in all of my English classes. The first time I

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took a step back and thought that I needed to draft, redraft, and edit my papers was when I was
writing my personal statements for college applications. But even then, I did at most one or two
drafts per essay. Writing 39B was the first time I was required to submit multiple drafts before an
essay was due for a grade. And because of this, I was able to invest more into my papers and
realize that I could analyze my papers more. This was, at first, a difficult transition for me
because I never looked at writing the same way I looked at music. I always saw other subjects in
the same light as music methodical and progressive. Writing was always something that I
believed came naturally to me. And because of this, I never invested the amount of time and
effort into getting better at it until I was force to do so. This process of drafting, revising, and
editing has carried over to 39C and has proven to be a necessary process to improve as a writer.
As a writer, I feel that my mechanics are solid and that I generally have very few
grammar mistakes. What I have been struggling with in writing is more of the nuanced aspects of
creating a strong paper, whether it be diction or organization. One aspect of writing that I believe
I had an issue with at the beginning of the quarter was pacing my paper. At times, I spent too
much time discussing one topic and piling so much information into one paragraph while I
breezed over others with little to no substance in them.

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Figure 1: HCP First Draft Introduction

The picture shown above is an image of my first draft of the Historical Conversations
Project (HCP). The text highlighted in yellow represents my introduction paragraph, which
constitutes about a page and a half of my essay. According to some metrics we established in
class, a strong paragraph with a good amount of evidence should at most one page. My
introduction, that has no quotes or data analysis, took almost a page and a half. And this problem
with pacing that I had in my first paragraph is representative of something that I struggled with
the entire quarter. I came into the quarter expecting to spend the next ten weeks researching
medical epidemics around the world and researching causes and actions that are being taken to
fix this problems. When Dr. Meghdadi told us that we had the choice to write about any topic
that we wanted, I jumped on the opportunity to write about something near and dear to my heart
classical music. As evidenced through my answers to the Question of the Day, I am

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passionate about the violin and classical music. This passion evidently carried over into my
writing as well, which had both positive and negative effects on my papers. On the positive side,
I had great insight into the classical music industry already and was able to provide good analysis
on how factors influence the classical music industry. On the down side, I found myself rambling
a lot and providing lots of information that was completely irrelevant to my essays. In this
introduction I discussed my involvement with classical music as an introduction to classical
music and my concern for its decline. However, I ended up including far too many unnecessary
details that a lot of readers found unnecessary, as shown in figure two.
Figure 2: Peer Review Comment

This trend continued throughout the rest of my first draft, as well as my second draft of
my HCP. In my second draft, I still was not hitting the hammer on the head rambling on about
miscellaneous information. Here, I discussed far too much music history than necessary(second
draft, third paragraph), which made my second draft drag. Again, this paragraph was extremely
long and did not have as much correlation to my paper. On top of that, I still was unable to draw
any connection from a common reader to classical music or discuss a particular point of origin
for my topic. Coming into my final draft, I knew I had a lot of work to do to make sure my final
paper was worthy of being submitted, so I overhauled most of my second draft.

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Figure 3: HCP Final Draft

Above in figure 3 is a highlighted image of my entire HCP final draft. The yellow portion
is what was kept from my second draft. This information was mostly anecdotal and one
paragraph discussing classical musics reflection of the political spectrum. Everything in green
was not in the second draft and was added to establish ethos in my paper. The majority of the
green content is analytical and discusses cultural differences and shows the reader why classical
music has been declining. To put the amount of work I did in overhauling my second draft into
perspective, my second draft was seven pages of mostly anecdotal evidence that did a poor job of
establishing any sort of ethos. With my final draft, I was able to provide valuable insight on the
decline of music and how the stigma around it today is contributing to its decline. Through
getting rid of my excessive musical anecdotes, I was able to increase the pace of the paper by

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getting to my points quicker and keeping the readers attention. Unfortunately, I still failed to
elicit any urgency towards my topic and it was still rendered a non-issue.

This, again, ties to my issue of my passion for the subject blinding my objective eye. Up
until this point, I was still operating under the mindset that a well written argument would bring
awareness to classical musics decline. Once I received this comment, I was certain that I had to
do a better job of making this an issue that people should care about. This, in itself, was probably
the hardest part of the class for me. I figured something so vital in a young persons life would be
easy to argue for, but then I thought about all the arguments for increased funding for arts in the
schools and remember how much its proponents are still fighting for it because it has become
sort of a nonissue. This is where I had to think critically about betterment and how classical
music could be used as a tool to better society.

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In the beginning of the quarter, Dr. Meghdadi said that this class was thinking class,
not a writing class and that we would have to think about how to construct quality papers
rather than figuring out how to write them. At this juncture in the quarter, the class entirely
became a thinking class. As evidenced by my first lexicon that defined better, I was not
thinking very much up until this point. My definition was mundane and shallow and had no
moral implications to it. At this point, I began thinking critically about how better affects my
life. Later that week (week 4), I doled out, what I believe, to be one of the best pieces I wrote all
quarter in my reflection blog. In this blog, I discussed how betterment was a process and that it
was these small steps that we take throughout our lives that make us better individuals. Then, it
hit me. I could use classical music as a tool for betterment because of the social and cognitive
benefits that it provides. This was the turning part of my writing for this quarter.
Up until the beginning of the advocacy project, I had mostly been writing aspects of
classical music that I knew personally and could attest to without much research, taking the easy
way out.
Figure 4: Chronology of Bibliographies

Shown above is the progress of my research throughout the quarter. In the beginning, I
only had two sources that were supposed to substantiate an entire essay. By the time I finished

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my advocacy project, I had researched over 30 sources that I used to fuel my arguments with
ethos and logos. Researching for reasons for society to care about classical music made me think
harder about why I should be promoting classical music as a tool for betterment. And the results
I found were pleasing as I found multiple physical, mental, and social benefits that correlate to
classical music.
Moreover, I learned how to properly research for an extensive paper. I learned that I
cannot create a substantial, well executed argument with only ten sources, that it takes a village
to raise a child. And I used a village of sources to create my one paper. Before, in research, I
simply tried to find that golden paper that would provide me all the information I needed for
my paper and I could use to base my argument and surround it with a few more articles for facts.
Researching a topic such as my own, I learned that this paper did not exist. There was going to
be no topic that specifically discussed why society needs classical music back in its life. I had to
pull all of my sources to find information that would substantiate an argument and take bits and
pieces from other experts arguments to create a coherent paper. And even though this process
was extremely tedious, it was worth it in the end to be able to support my claims.
My final draft of my Advocacy project took all the tools I have learned from this class
and pieced it all together. I made sure the tempo of my paper was decent and that no one
particular paragraph dragged too long. I thought long and hard about the different facets of my
argument and why classical music should be integrated more into society. I performed hours and
hours of extensive research to find evidence to back my claims. And through it all, I was able to
produce a paper that I believe is well thought and well-executed. But what really made my paper
and my learning experience as nuanced as it is was the community that I was surrounded with
and the amount of peer work that we did. Through peer revisions, I was able to not only help

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others with their papers, but also find errors and trends in my own papers that might not have
been possible if I did not notice them in others work.
Writing 39C has taught me a bevy of trades. But what will stick with me the most is how
to think and how to argue. And these were not just learned within the assignments, but also in the
discussions and daily questions that we were asked in class. I learned to not see everything so
one-dimensionally, and that every answer has an intrinsic motivation behind it. I learned how to
analyze everyday conversations on a level that I never though before. And in doing so, I feel that
I have become a more knowledgeable and aware individual. What this class has shown me is that
I can take my values that I apply to music and apply them to all facets of life and use it to
become a better individual. I have not become perfect, but through this class, I have become
better. And through the small steps that I have taken, I have increased the quality of my mind and
the quality of my life.