Dear Rafeal Radna,

Writing Two has been a surprisingly fun and inspirational experience of my summer.
Why surprisingly? I have never liked English writing classes because of their rigid nature: a five
paragraph essay, following an outline, and using a thesis statement to conclude the main ideas.
Though writing is a tool for communication, the artsy and expressionistic nature of writing
should never be hindered. Coming from China, where children were taught to express
themselves with writing growing up, there were no limits for our writing. Writing was more
emotional than technical. However, in U.S. highschool classes, writing became a boring
efficiency competition. In “Was The Five-Paragraph Essay Format Ever Useful?”, Shii Lin
questioned the benefit of learning the efficient five paragraph essay as her blog topic. In her blog
post, she expressed researchers' concern that formative essays limit both the teacher’s and
student's creativity with writing. Writing Two inspired me, again, to think about the purpose of
writing. Unlike the writing classes that taught me the “How” of writing, Writing Two has taught
me the “Why”.
Regardless of the benefit of the formative essays, I believe that people significantly
overlook the real beauty of writing — expression — that can also be convincing without using
formative robot diction. This is why I enjoyed this class, we were encouraged to think about
writing prior to “do writing”, and we were wisely guided to produce valuable writing with
purpose. At the end of this class, I gained a valuable ability to decipher the purpose and audience
of genre and use genres as a tool to enhance my writing.
The two WP’s taught me the purpose of genre and benefited my practice in
metacognition, an idea that one will really learn from writing when they think about their
thoughts throughout their writings (Tinberg). Different from conventional writing projects, the
WP’s let me translate academic writing into a non-professional genre of my own choice. Genre,
described by Lisa Bickmore in GENRE in the Wild , is a distinct style of writing that delivers
messages to a defined purpose and group of audience. Genre is “ typified utterance that appears
in a recurrent situation… [it] evolves through human use and activity to be a durable and usable
form for carrying out human communicative intentions in fairly stable ways” (Bickmore). What
would be a better way to learn than practice with a genre translation project?
In WP1, I translated a scientific research paper on how to make plastic out of plants. My
goal of translation was to turn a paper about research findings into a more argumentative one.
The biggest take away was to correctly target the purpose and the audience of my translation.
New to the concept, I could not think of a better term to describe the audience than the “general
public”. Instructor Rafael inspired me by asking me the question, “why should the general public
be interested in your topic of presentation? ” . The question was sharp and quick in addressing
the root of my confusion. By putting myself into the audience’s shoes, I realized that the “general
public” would not be voluntarily wanting to learn how to convert plants into plastic, nor do they
have the equipment and knowledge to do so. Knowing that, shaping the intended audience
became much easier and I eventually decided to let them be industry owners who are interested
in new methodologies. From WP1, I learned that genre is a tool. People make genres to achieve
their goals. Therefore, by asking ourselves that “what / who exactly do I want to convey? ”, we
saddle purpose and audience, and we match the right genre that serves all of our expectations.
In WP2, conversational inquiry is introduced. It is described by Writing about writing
that it is like a party full of scholars who ask questions, answer questions, and shares about their
investigations (Wardle). Meanwhile, we are going to engage ourselves as well as the scholars
after picking up their arguments. WP2 is an extension of skills from WP1. After learning how to
identify our audience, purpose and why do we write in a way we do, we train our sense of
engaging arguments through WP2. My biggest take away from WP2 is to smoothly introduce
and engaging scholar sources into an article. There are many ways to cite source. However, to
diversify the sentences and keep the readers entertained, it is important to incorporate different
sentence modifiers, engaging words such as “however”, “nevertheless”, and “meanwhile” to
created a smooth transition between cited sources and our own words. It is important to engage
the sources into the writing to create fluency.
My biggest take away from this class is the concept of metacognition. I have always
thought that the word “Genre” is just another word for “type”. However, genre is purpose,
audience, and a pathway to deliver messages in the most proper ways. Both WP’s have shown
me the “Why’s” behind my choices of writing : if I want to convey scientific ideas to industry
owners, I will use a powerpoint, minimize jargons, and incorporate pictures for better
understanding; if I want to create a conversation on academic disciplines, I should give Reddit a
try. Writing is no longer a form of speech that is formed based on the way I feel but with reasons.
I learned that behind each choice I made, it doesn't matter if it is rhetorical choices, genre choice,
or writing structure choices, there is a certain purpose: to argue, to convey, or to discuss.
Knowing the purpose clears the path of our thoughts and sharpens our arguments.
 Work Cited

Tinberg, H, (n.d.). Metacognition Is Not Cognition

Wardle, E., & Downs, D. (2022). Writing about writing . Bedford/St. Martin’s, Macmillan

Learning.

Bickmore, L, GENRE in the WILD