Resilience Story Essay Discussion

1) To be frank, I struggled a lot before making my choice between the two optional films: The Shawshank Redemption and To Live, especially when I found the former one on the top of the recommendation list by Professor Caputo. Undoubtedly, both films are outstanding resiliency stories in relation to their respective cultural and historical context. The Shawshank Redemption enjoys popularity among the audience as an uncrown king and is the favorite to my mother who introduced it to me when I was only five. However, I finally chose To Live because it deserves more attention as a saga of an ordinary Chinese getting through those difficult eras. Instead of totally giving up The Shawshank Redemption, I involved it and two other masterpieces of 1994, the craze year in the cinematic history, in my analysis to make comparison with To Live. Up to now, I have finished the major part of the body, and I am satisfied with my attempt to analyze the film rather than introduce the plots. However, it looks more like a film review since I haven’t completed the part related to a contemporary concern. Every time when I watch this film, I cannot help pondering how resilient a person can be to suffer such heavy loss in life and regain the inner peace after the storm. Is resilience the decisive quality for people to move on or to give up? To contextualize my essay, I have done some research on the suicidal problem, including searching for the latest information on people’s reaction in the ongoing pandemic. I will add the relevant sources to my revision to make my essay more contextualized and academic.

2) Writing my resilience story analysis has been smooth far because the comparative essay analysis enlightened me on how to go about when composing multi modal essays. I have strived to avoid all the mistakes that I made in the comparative essay which has made writing my current essay smoother. The annotated bibliography I composed before delving into my fast draft prepared me adequately in providing points and evidences which I will incorporate in my essay. There is no much struggle with thesis essay because I focused on an inspirational documentary which I had watched before this class. Besides aiming for a higher grade, I am aiming at embracing resilience when dealing with various obstacles in my life. In my final editing I will ensure that that all captions are formatted uniformly. Moreover, I will ensure that the images which I add to the essay are integrated to the paper smoothly. Another revision I will do is to ensure that all the sources are formatted according to MLA.

3) My Reliance story essay so far has been really intriguing and fun to write so far. I get a lot of comments on my thesis statements being unclear. I think I truly have struggled with thesis statements for a very long time. I've always either written too much or too little. I've also always been terrible at transitions, I've always thought they were tedious and unnatural in my writing. I'm hoping to refine those minute details so I can feel more confident in my essay. Overall, I've been pretty motivated by the prompt, and the sheer brilliance of the movie, so writing and revising has gone quite well. I am also a little confused on if the essay is

supposed to sound this summarizing and whether to intertwine the academic literature throughout the paper, or if I should simply have a section discussing it, and then relating a few points from the essay simultaneously.