Lucas Joseph Joseph 1

WRIT 2

15 June 2023

PERM: 4395034

Writing 2 Reflection

Hi Eugene! At the beginning of this quarter, I thought that much wouldn’t change

as far as my writing ability. I was surprised however to find that I actually improved in a

number of ways and met some of the goals I set out for myself in one of my first

journals, such as improving my process of engaging with academic texts and

developing my ability to write fiction. I think journaling was a great tool I’d like to use in

future writing classes, as it was a way for me to reflect on my progress and helped me

evaluate my own skills. I found that once I identified my strengths and weaknesses, I

could change the way I thought about my writing and use my strengths to solve new

problems.

My biggest strength in writing is my ability to have my ideas logically flow from

one to the next. My history in argumentative writing gave me practice in thoughtfully

analyzing complex materials and crafting concise responses so that my audience isn’t

left confused with my writing. When putting together my first draft of Writing Project 1, I

realized that generally when writing, I assume that my audience was just like me. I

received one piece of feedback where the commenter was confused as to what exactly

a “headslide” was and why it required traction to perform. To me, the concept of a

headslide made perfect sense, but the comment showed me that not everyone has the

same knowledge as I do. This false assumption of mine was an error in applying the

principle of transfer properly. When we read Kara Taczak’s piece earlier in the quarter,

the author gives readers the advice to consider three key terms when writing “such as
 Joseph 2

purpose, audience, and genre [that] help provide a way for you to better understand the

writing situation and to articulate that understanding”(Taczak 308). While I knew that my

purpose was to inform others on breakdancing culture and related injuries through the

genre of rap, I realized that I wanted to broaden my audience to my peers who may not

understand the more niche areas of breaking as well as hip-hop fans. I used

annotations in my draft to solve some of these issues. I also went back after submitting

the teacher draft to properly record my song and wrote about some of the feedback I

received from you as well as my peers in the revised reflection portion of that project.

This feedback was useful in getting rid of the past perspective I had of my audience that

damaged my writing and will surely aid me as I write about other subjects for future

courses.

The ability to write logically would also help me overcome one of my weaknesses

of writing fiction and see the process in a new light, which I explored in Writing Project

2. Similarly to how I would have to make my arguments go from one to the next

naturally, I would have to make sure that my characters’ actions would be reasonable

given the situation and their own personality and motivations. While writing my second

project, I would often have to go back through a paragraph and insert new sentences

where I found awkward jumps between actions without clear motivation. Once doing so,

my piece dramatically improved.

I would however find that this process was only useful once I applied the advice

of Anne Lammot in “Shitty First Drafts” by first writing as much as I could with no regard

for quality. Though I had a picture of what kind of story I wanted to write, I soon

understood the author’s point that “The right words and sentences just do not come
 Joseph 3

pouring out like ticker tape most of the time”(Lammot 22). I put my desire for perfection

and coherence to the side during parts where I was stuck and just focused on getting to

the end of the finish line. Once I had a story that had structure, I was able to add in as

much detail as I would have wanted so that the main character felt like a real person

and not some object of a story.

Because both writing projects also required us to find interesting peer-reviewed

research, I also had to develop new ways to look at academic material, something I was

looking forward to doing out of my desire to do research before graduation. Finding

research related to my intended question in Writing Project 2 was much more difficult

than I anticipated and I spent a large amount of time trying to find papers that

represented the concept of a discourse community. My process included looking at the

title and keywords and doing a quick read through, which would lead me to find that my

articles did not line up with my goal for the project at all. Karen Rosenberg’s “Reading

Games” mirrored my mistakes exactly where “I’d breeze through the introduction to get

to the ‘meat’ of the text...[and then] find myself in the middle of some dense reading,

perhaps understanding the content of a particular paragraph, but completely unable to

connect that paragraph with the overall structure of the article”(Rosenberg 216). This

reading taught me that if I instead did incredibly detailed readings of introductions of

possible academic articles, I would have spent less time trying to make articles that

didn’t speak to my research question work for my project.

The writing projects offered unique ways for me to explore my interests and test

myself as a writer, and if I had more time, I would have loved to explore my Writing

Project 1 even more. One of my original ideas was to make a vlog going over my
 Joseph 4

breakdance training while going over the moves that can lead to injury(in a safe way of

course). Maybe I’ll get the opportunity over the summer to make something like that

when I have more time. I hope you can take away that I really did surprise myself with

how much I learned about myself as a writer and that I used what I learned to improve

upon my shortcomings.

All the best,

Lucas Joseph
 Joseph 5

Works Cited

Lamott, Anne. “Shitty First Drafts.” Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

New York, Pantheon, 1994.

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

Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 2, edited by Charles Lowe and

Pavel Zemliansky, Anderson, South Carolina, Parlor Press, 2011.

Takczak, Kara. “Reflection is Critical for Writers’ Development.” Naming What We Know:

Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, Classroom Edition, edited by Linda

Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, Logan, Utah State University Press, 2016.