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Dear Readers,

Thank you for joining me on this wonderful and challenging writing journey. There are

so many things that I have learned that I wish to recap with you all. First, I found that rewriting

and revising my writing projects helped clarify areas within my writing that needed to be

addressed. As Irvin explains, revision is not simply the cosmetic changes of punctuation and

syntax; it’s a longer process in which its purpose is to improve the meaning within your writing.

That is to say, it’s the practice of writing and rewriting in order to ensure you are saying what

you mean and meaning what you say (318-319). For instance, in my first stage of my first

writing project, my poem was not specific enough to understand that it related directly to my

selected article’s main ideas. The stanzas I composed simply referenced the general concept of

water scarcity, but did not utilize key concepts or the findings of the scientists’ data from within

the article I was translating. Reviewing and rewriting my poem entirely helped me discover the

direction I needed to take in order to deliver the information from the article so that it didn’t get

lost in translation. Needless to say, revision was central to discovering what I wished to convey

through my free verse poetry.

As for my second writing project, I found citation chaining to be the most important step

of the development process in addition to annotating the sources I found after citation chaining.

Doing this helped me to find a closely knit, cohesive group of sources that revolved around my

research question as they were actively building on each other’s ideas. I struggled to find lots of

sources surrounding reading invisibility and teaching reading strategies in the classroom, so

searching through the author’s bibliographies made it easier to track the flow of the conversation

over time. Once I selected my sources for this project, I spent an entire weekend reading through
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them and annotating them to make it easier to access the crucial information later. I utilized

Rosenberg’s reading strategies to get through my sources; first, I found that really analyzing the

titles of the sources was crucial to identifying whether they were a good fit for my research or

not. The title provides a lot of information about what the article is about before even reading the

article, which is quite helpful in reading in a time efficient manner (Rosenberg 215). After doing

detailed readings and annotations of the articles, it helped me make sense of what I wanted to

write in my project and what information I wished to share with my audience.

I know it sounds silly, but after writing “gloomy blooms,” I realized that free verse poetry

is both easy and difficult to write. The lack of rules and formal structure provides the writer with

creative freedom, but there is also no guidance or template to use. Especially since water scarcity

mainly results from climate change, a broad issue, it was difficult to find specific words and

phrases to piece together a narrative that spoke specifically to water scarcity and the scope of the

issue. This is one of the main reasons why I found revision to be the most important stage of my

writing process for the first writing project. With this new genre of writing, it was very easy for

ideas to get “lost in translation,” even though it was a change of genre occurring within the same

language. I was initially overwhelmed with the amount of information on the article about water

scarcity and I had no idea how to even begin to convey that information through a free verse

poem. After reading Irvin’s essay on revision, it lessened my frustration. The truth is that when

we start writing, “we don’t have everything figured out,” as that is something that is discovered

throughout the writing process (322). Finding the comfort in these facts motivated me to keep

going and to not be discouraged if I don’t get everything perfect the first time; it’s hard to know

what you’re missing in writing, especially when you haven’t even finished writing anything yet.
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I was quite eager to dive into some new and unfamiliar situations with writing project 2.

That is to say, I had a lot of fun using research databases for the first time because it’s like a little

library that you can customize and filter at the click of a button. Navigating a library as large as

the one we have here at UCSB is overwhelming to say the least. With these databases, I learned

how to refine the results so it saves a lot of time. It also ensured that I would be finding mainly

scholarly articles in comparison to a simple Google search. I have to admit that I found it

exciting to see some articles appear before me that were related to teaching reading in the

classroom, or the lack thereof. Also, since this was my first time using databases like CompPile

to do a research project, I felt like learning to navigate them has prepared me for future research

that may necessitate their use.

My research for this project was initially fueled by my frustration with the lack of

instructors teaching reading strategies in the classroom despite emphasizing the readings as

central to classroom discussions. Finding articles that actually touched on this issue was

comforting to me because I felt seen and heard in my struggles with reading. I felt that

Rosenberg’s article on reading strategies resonated with me for the exact same reason. Like

Rosenberg, I often get irritated when assigned readings are difficult to understand or too long to

read in the allotted time; furthermore, these difficulties with reading made me feel as if I was

“too dumb to read academic texts” (211). All of that changed once I began research on reading

invisibility. I felt empowered through my research, as if I had a voice in the scholarly

conversation! Finding these people who cared enough to speak on the lack of support for

teaching reading made me feel that there really are people out there who want to advocate for

students like me who would greatly benefit from some additional assistance from instructors.

When I gathered all of my sources and put them together in my writing project, it genuinely felt
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as if these scholars were having an actual conversation with each other, especially when they

played off of each other’s concepts and ideas.

I was really happy with all the creative liberty I had in regards to the genre in which I

presented my research. I initially decided on free verse poetry as the new genre for writing

project 1 because I enjoy writing poetry. I feel like the passion fueled me, it helped turn the

project into something fun for me. Even though I ran into trouble initially with conveying the

original article’s key ideas, I was able to get some helpful advice and feedback from both my

instructor and my peers. I want to give a shoutout to my instructor Maddie; I wouldn’t have been

aware of what I needed to work on if it weren’t for her feedback. I also want to give credit to my

friend Lee, they sat down with me and helped me work through the changes I made to my poem

for this project. One can see Lee’s help through the incorporation of key terms such as

“watershed” and elaborating on it.

Looking back upon my reflections, I feel as though I did a satisfactory job at quoting and

analyzing course readings. After reading them, I can definitely see how concepts such as Irvin’s

reading about the revision process informed my work. As for referring to my own writing, I feel

as though I was very brief when referencing my own works; I didn’t feel like I got super detailed

and specific about examples of my own writing, but maybe it would have been more appealing if

I were to get into detail about my writing. In my reflections, I feel like I made it clear as to why I

selected the topic that I did and/or the new genre that I used to translate the information.

Overall, I feel that this writing class was very helpful and non-threatening when it comes

to developing my reading and writing skills. I was given a lot of room to grow, and because of

that, I feel like I have a closer relationship with writing than I did before. Just like how reading is

a subject that’s often glossed over, I feel that I was never really given much attention in my
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classes; very few classes aside from Writing 2 taught in depth about how writing is a process that

takes both time and effort. One of the main takeaways I got from this class is that you should

spend as much time revising as you did with writing the first draft. It’s really fun seeing what

new ideas I can come up with and incorporate into my writing during the revision process. The

discussion of reading strategies was also a lesson that stuck with me, especially because it

directly ties into my research for writing project 2. Learning how to skim and annotate readings

is a valuable skill that I can use in all of my other classes, and I most definitely will do so.

Hopefully I will be able to notice “patterns” in the various structures and genres of writing that I

will have to read in the future such that it makes my experiences with reading less frustrating.

Once again, thank you all for joining me on this fun journey. I hope you all enjoyed the

works that I had to offer and my thoughts on them. See you soon! :)

Yours truly,

Jayson Socki