I never imagined I would be writing a review here. To get straight to the point, this class depends on your TA and classmates. I have never found Professor Bascara to be helpful. The reason I said this class depends on your TA and your classmates is because the discussion section of this class is about 2 hours long and most of the things are explained by the TA and this class is done through discussions with your classmates.

To elaborate on the problem of this class, Professor Bascara's characteristic is that the instructions for the assignments in this class are vague and he unnecessarily explains simple words in a complicated way. I don't know if he did this to everyone, but he never answered any of my questions. Moreover, if you are confused about the assignment instructions and ask a question to the TA, but the TA has no ability to answer your question or avoids answering, you will have a hard time. My TA this quarter was Ghalia, and I would like to say AVOID HER AT ALL COSTS. Next quarter is my last quarter at UCLA and Ghalia is the worst TA I've ever had. I've never seen anyone who doesn't respect her students as much as she does. I could tell a lot about her, but I'll stop it here. All I want to say is, AVOID HER AT ALL COSTS and UCLA should not hire TAs like Ghalia. Lastly, if you don't understand something and don't get an answer from the professor or TA, you'll probably ask your classmates. This is why I said this class depends on your classmates. Get to know your classmates as much as possible during section time and get help if you can. One of the things I regret most about this class is that I didn't become closer to classmates. At least in my experience, you can't expect anything from the professor in this class and there's no help you can get from the TA (Ghalia).

This was an OK class. The grade breakdown was:
• Discussion section work: 20%
• Diagnostic Micropaper: 5%
• Paper 1 (draft and revision): 20%
• Paper 2 (draft and revision): 20%
• Asian Pacific American cultural event report(s): 5%
• Midterm activity: 5%
• Paper 3 (quarter-long full-section collaborative project): 20%
• Final activity: 5%
Your grade depends mostly on the TAs and mine was luckily pretty chill. Also, the Gazan protests put us in a weird position so that might have also made the paper grading much more lenient.
Prof Bascara himself is a nice dude and he grades Paper 3 and the two activities leniently, but he is extremely vague and confusing. The paper prompts were honestly very open-ended, which would have been fine but there were some parts that just didn't make sense. His lecturing style is also fairly confusing, and I found it super hard to pay attention. And even though he takes attendance for lecture, it's not mandatory so half of the class ended up ditching by the end of the quarter. I will say that it would be in your best interest to attend if he shows some of the videos on the syllabus because some are hard to find online, and you may need to analyze them for either the papers or the activities.
Overall, it's not a hard Writing II course as long as you put a bit of effort in the assignments, papers, and discussion.