Chris Barrera-Martinez

5 June 2020

What I came to realize

In this course there are a lot of good techniques to learn from that can be useful in

writing. This course helps you see elements of writing that some of us never really paid attention

to in reading and in writing. The process of understanding and being able to improve one’s

writing wasn’t simple, but it was able to improve. Students get a lot of helpful resources and

assignments that break up the entirety of an essay into many condensed elements which helps

them at last piece everything together to form a well-organized essay. This class with the

assignments, reading and portfolio helps students to understand and get a better sense of their

writing and noticing their improvements.

The readings that were provided helped evolve techniques and ways of thinking

towards reading and writing. The lessons that the professor gave us were straightforward on what

our accomplishment for that week was. The readings had many ideas and techniques on what the

topic of the reading was going to be about. Some of the techniques it talked about were

understanding some of the aspects in a writing, being able to see the importance of the audience

and the diction directed to each audience, being able to read a passage without getting bored

which helped a lot personally. All these readings helped to understand and give attention to

things I never really thought about in writing. Every time I wrote before I always thought that to

be a good paragraph it had to follow the structure of being 5 paragraphs with one introductory

paragraph, 3 body paragraphs, and finally your conclusion. With readings and the Writing

Project 1 (WP1) I was able to see that it wasn’t the case you can format and explain your

information the way it fits best regarding your topic and how you think it will get the message
across to your audience. The readings helped to think of different ways of delivering your

message and being able understand books and other readings. In a course reading by Bunn, How

to read like a reader, he states “Consider what techniques could have made the text better.

Deciding how to include the best attributes of what you read in your own writing.”1 This quote

really made me understand that being able to understand readers is a really important part of

developing ones writing by using certain techniques that the author used. These readers that were

given to us made me realize that there is a lot of work and small factors that come into play in

writing that can have a great impact on the way your writing is seen by others.

The course assignments that were given to us brought out a purpose to our writing.

Throughout this quarter we had multiple assignments to complete like journals which were a way

to describe how you were able to interpret a certain reading or activity. The next were PB that we

had to do to use in our process leading to writing our WP1. In these PB we worked to understand

the importance of rhetoric and genre. Rhetoric is the way one reflects or analyzes something in

depth to make up a conclusion. As Laura Carrol mentions in her article Backpack vs Briefcase,

“Chance are you have grown up learning to interpret and analyze these types of rhetoric. They

become so commonplace that we don’t realize how often and how quickly we are able to

perform this kind of rhetoric analysis” which are the “same ones that you’ll use in these

assignments.”2 This shows that many of us know what these terms are but never really thought

about them in that way, the same goes for genre that can be anything that is an object and has

words on it that describes it. These PB have also helped with citation problems and helped use

resources that we have available to us. The ability of working on something and being able to get

feedback from a work you have done was a really important part of my understanding of the

1 Mike Bunn, “Writing Spaces,” How to Read Like a Writer | Writing Spaces: 85.
2 Laura Carroll, “Writing Spaces,” Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps Toward Rhetorical Analysis |
Writing Spaces: 48.
improvement of my writing. These PB helped to work on our own and later get feedback on what

we had done and clarify on what things we had missed and what things we can work on and

notice.

The WP as a whole had a great deal of time writing them and is where most of my

improvements came to be seen. In WP1 we began by choosing a topic and researching how two

disciplines research that same topic but how each one focuses on their own discourse

communities. During this process I realized my writing was improving based on the ideas that I

had to write, the way I formatted my paper, and diction that I use. I still struggled with the

process of starting my essay which took me quite some time. The feedback that I got from peers

in WP1 was really helpful to my overall writing and made me realize something that were

implemented on WP2. The feedback given from peers and teachers helps a lot on how one can

improve their writing and what specific things someone can work on. Both WP had a great deal

of importance on the development of how the structure was going to look, the audience I was

approaching, the diction I had to use and what information was necessary.

The process of being able to revise one’s own work isn’t such an easy process. For our

portfolio we had to revise and make our WP1 and WP2 seem very different. One way that I was

able to achieve this was by thinking like my audience and reading my paper over and over and

seeing what things someone might get confused on and what can I add or take out for it to sound

much clearer.I took into account something I read in our course readers by Rosenberg in

Reading Games where she states that “Once you have the main argument you can make wise

decisions about which parts of the text you need to pore over and which you can blithely skim.”3

I took this comment into consideration while I was working and saw that there were items that

3 Karen Rosenberg, “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources,” Writing
Spaces: 219
could be taken out. Other stylistic factors that I had to change which might seem slim but have

an importance are the grammas and style of sentences. In one case some ideas had to be

separated since they were two points in one which were separated to make two different claims

on how they both had an impact on the writing. The problem that I had the most was being able

to format and give credit to resources that I used which were cited wrong but was able to change

them. These were some of the main reflections that were seen in my WP1 and WP2 that shows

the importance of going back and reflect some of the techniques I learned from this course being

put into play.

My writing as a whole was really improved over the years but mainly during this course.

I had realized how much I had improved until I was reading my writing during reflection and

realizing the amount of work that I’ve put in. These assignments, readings and courses have

helped me reflect on the importance of writing and the small details that I never really paid

attention to and how they have a huge impact on a writer. I personally feel much better about my

writing and I understand why writing is such an easy task to do, a lot of components come into

writing something. This course has helped me be much more open minded on how people write

and how each little detail makes a difference.

Bibliography

Bunn, Mike. “Writing Spaces.” How to Read Like a Writer | Writing Spaces: 71- 86.

https://writingspaces.org/bunn--how-to-read-like-a-writer
Carroll, Laura. “Writing Spaces.” Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps Toward Rhetorical Analysis |

Writing Spaces:45-58. https://writingspaces.org/essays/backpacks-vs-briefcases

Rosenberg, Karen. “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources.” Writing Spaces:

210-220. https://writingspaces.org/rosenberg--reading-games