Junjie Fang

Writ 2

Cover letter

2022 Jun 7th

Now, we are heading towards the end of the quarter. Looking back, I believe I have had a

mentally satisfying and academically fruitful quarter in Writ 2. This essay will explain how I

have benefited from working with different genres and reading or learning course materials at

the stages of planning, drafting, and revising my writing projects.

As two writing projects require us to write in a specific genre, it is crucial to understand the

conventions of target genres during the planning stages. The two genres, product release

presentations and online academic forums, are not literature genres- novel, drama, poem, etc.

I cannot find many documented conventions of those genres on the internet, so the only

feasible way is to conclude those conventions from examples. The ideas I have learned from

Mike Bunn's essay "How to Read Like a Writer" play a vital role. Bunn suggests that we read

to learn about writing. We shall consider that by what choices he or she made, the author led

our reactions and carefully evaluate the effectiveness of those strategies if we apply them in

our writing. A series of commonly used strategies make a genre, so I can have a deeper

understanding of conventions and produce better work by reading as a writer.

In WP1, I use three product release presentations as my reference. In the product release

presentation of the Tesla Model 3, Elon Musk opened it by discussing carbon emission and

global warming to emphasize the urgency of a transformation to the electric car, which is a

pathological approach. I realize the pathological approach exploits the informal nature of

product release presentation to yield extra persuasiveness, so I also open my presentation

with an emphasis on the environmental damage led by disposable masks. In the product
release presentation of Apple M1 chips, I have noticed that the presenters develop the

presentation around the product's key characteristics while focusing on comparison when it

comes to data. Thinking reflectively, I believe those choices are made in response to the

audience groups. As a result, I also incorporate those strategies in my translation work. They

are the key factors to making the ideas in academic essays clear to normal people. In WP2, I

am creating my online academic forum by referring to a website called "research gate."

Going over the posts on the website, I also discover some patterns in their interactions. For

example, people's responses are relatively formal, being drafted as letters to the person they

respond to. Their attitudes are moderate- they seldomly directly deny the thoughts of others.

In my draft, each author agrees with others' ideas to some extent and is thankful for others'

suggestions and comments. With the convention I learned from those examples, I can write

better. The ability to analyze and learn from examples will be beneficial in all types of

assignments I will encounter in the future. Besides that, in WP2, I also have a deeper

understanding of normal discourses: how researchers develop knowledge by communicating

with each other.

When it comes to writing the first draft, Lamott and Elbow's writing serves as essential

guidance to me. Lamott faithfully documents her experience of being frustrated with writing

the first draft but finally realizes she shall at least get a start no matter if the writing is perfect.

Similarly, Elbow suggests that creative and intuitive thinking in the first draft is helpful to our

writing project, and we shall not confine them. We still can use our conscious and controlled

thoughts to polish our writing later on. They encourage me to draft without constrictions, and

it indeed helps me to yield many valuable ideas. For example, in WP1, I let users picture the

unpleasant experience of wearing a conventional mask, which is not a part of the original

work. Still, it will be interesting to interact with the audience as I imagine that I will be

presenting on the stage. That's the intuitive thinking I have acquired.

Besides the planning and drafting stage, the revising stage is also fruitful.

In WP1, the major issue reported is related to the surface mechanism, and that is also the

major place for improvement. In the process of revising WP1, the reading from Williams

about sentence and paragraph level revisions helps me a lot. After reading the chapters, I

have found several persistent issues in my writing that stemmed from how I learned English

writing before entering college. Previously, I wrote as a language learner- teachers required

me to write in different sentence patterns and structures to be familiar with variable usages.

Still, some of those may not be how we are used to writing in academic writing. The reading

from Williams has successfully corrected my misconceptions.

Another piece of writing I found useful is from Harris. He concluded four questions we need

to ask ourselves during revision which are "what's your project?", "What works?", "What else

might be said?" and "what's next?". The feedback suggests some of the ideas are not fully

developed, so I find the last two questions especially helpful. I am going to use my revision

of one place to illustrate how the ideas from the two authors are helpful. In the first draft of

my reflective essay, to analyze a pattern in the original work, I wrote, "The sentence both has

the jargon 'filtering efficiency' and a hedging word 'may.' The use of jargon is related to the

genre's assumption that its readers are knowledgeable, and the usage of hedging language

should be attributed to the lack of experimental support." The sentence is overusing passive

voices, and real action "use" is not the verb. Moreover, by raising counterarguments from the

perspective of audiences, I found a logical gap between "assumption on readers background"

and "prevalent usage of jargon." At Last, by asking myself what else might be said, I find the

idea of hedging languages is an excellent topic to elaborate on- I can explore if there are other

situations in that authors may like to use hedging languages. In the final draft, I wrote, "The

sentence has the jargon "filtering efficiency" and a hedging word "may." The author use
jargon to facilitate communication efficiency under the assumption that the readers have

relevant knowledge. Because of the assumption, the term conveys the same information in a

shorter length with a joint agreement on its meaning. Here, the author writes in hedging

language since the results temporarily lack experimental support but sometimes, even with a

quantified result, researchers still tend to use hedging languages…." First, I use the real

actions as verbs in the active form. Second, I begin sentences with a repetition of previously

mentioned information and end sentences with new ideas. Finally, while declaring the reason

behind the prevalent usage genre is associated with the promotion of efficiencies, I explore

other situations where authors use hedging languages to expand my points. I think the ideas

from the two authors are also applicable to the revision work in the future. With their theories

in mind, I have more points to focus on in revision, which enhances my efficiency.

In WP2, the focus of revision is to increase the sense of dialogue and make the translated

work more like an online academic genre elementwise, and it's indeed very constructive

advice. In the first draft, I arrange the conversation in chronological order: the older ideas

come first, and the latter ideas respond and develop on it. The author first speaks and never

responds to the later views, which makes the whole conversation less like a conversation. My

solution is to let the earlier authors react to the latterly emerged ideas, even though they did

not in the original work. For example, Roskelly, the second author who showed his concept,

tried to defend against the counterarguments of his theories. It did not happen, but it is

reasonable given the author's attitude. To make the translated work website alike, I use

Weebly to create a real website, imitating the format of Research Gate. This is my favorite

part of my final portfolio since, with the aid of the website creator, I translate the abstract

conversation in the normal discourse into a real place with vividly characterized figures.

That's very interesting.

Generally, the biggest gain I get from the Writ 2 is knowing how to work on an assigned

writing project with an unfamiliar genre from beginning to end. As emphasized by both

instructors in my LING 3C and LING 12 courses, writing is a process. While the final yield is

a part of the consideration, how to develop our writings is the central idea of all writing

courses. This quarter, we learned how to analyze genre rhetorically, get started with our first

drafts, reflect on and revise our first drafts, and finally, edit and polish our writing for final

drafts. I am more familiar with those processes that will make my writing better throughout

readings and class activities. Such a process of writing will apply to all my writing projects in

the future, and I am looking forward to giving it a try.

 Works cited

Bunn, Mike. “How to Read Like a Writer.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, edited by

Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, e-book, vol. 2, Parlor Press, 2010, pp. 71–86.

Elbow, P. (1983). Teaching Thinking by Teaching Writing. Change: The Magazine of

Higher Learning, 15(6), 37–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/00091383.1983.10570005

Harris, Joseph. Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts, Second Edition. e-book, Utah State

University Press, 2017.

Williams, Joseph, and Joseph Bizup. Style. e-book, Pearson Education, 2014.