Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Reflective Letter
Reflective Letter
The assignments that I decided to include in my portfolio are writing project one and three.
These two writing projects greatly impacted me the most during this class. I decided to pick
writing project one because it was the lowest grade I received in the class and the paper needed a
lot of revision because I interpreted the articles horribly in this paper. In writing project one, I
discussed about genre identification and comparison. I used two articles for writing project one
and they were “The Search for Truth in the Rubble of Douma and One Doctor’s Doubts over
the Chemical Attack” by Robert Fisk and “Syria War: What We Know about Douma ‘Chemical
Attack’” by BBC. I carefully analyzed each article over again and to fully understand the
purpose of the article and be able to revise the paper to what it should have been from the
beginning. Writing project one helped us get a new understanding of genre and the knowledge of
writing. I decided to pick writing project three because it was the paper that I had the most fun
with and the paper that allowed me to fully incorporate what I learned in that class in one paper. I
translated one of my favorite songs “Ultralight Beam” by Kanye West into a testimony. I first
translated “Ultralight Beam” into a sermon, but I realized that it was more of a testimony than a
sermon. I had so much fun during the whole process of translating a genre into another and learn
so much about the components needed in order to translate a genre into another. Writing project
three allowed us to use all the resources we learned about genre in class to translate a genre into
another genre by understanding the audience, purpose, and writing conventions. The whole
process for my portfolio took weeks because I knew my papers needed a lot of work, but I did
not know where to start. There were too many thoughts going through my mind that it was hard
to revise the paper. Overall, I believe my portfolio came out great!
I think I have grown so much as a writer once I gotten into college. I had you as my professor for
the last two quarters and I can say with confidence that you made a huge impact in my growth as
a writer, but also as a college student. You challenged us a lot in class because you knew we were
capable of it and you helped us see new perspectives of what a writer can look like. My
perspective of writing dramastically changed as I thought that there was only one way of writing
papers. My overall flow of the paper improved a lot as I have been focusing on maintaining a
controlling idea throughout the paper. I have been also carefully looking at my grammar, writing
style, and conventions. I also realized how helpful writing proposals/outlines, rough drafts and
track changes can be. They helped me take baby steps before I start writing the final draft. I was
also able to learn something from each readings we had such as McCloud “Thinking with
Pictures” on how it helped me get a better understanding of what components I needed to know
to translate “Ultralight Beam” into a testimony. Every reading helped with the corresponding
paper we had to write about. Reading “Annoying Ways people use Sources” by Stedman, I
learned many ways on how sources are being misused and that people sometimes use too much
to the put it is redundant. Peerreview drafts, your comments, and Tiffany’s help really allowed
me to flourish and grow as a writer. These three moments were the key to my growth as a writer
because it allowed me to get new perspectives of my paper and allowed me to take in a lot of
knowledge as a writer. Readings and activities can change or improve a person’s writing skills
for a short amount of time, but interactions with other people can greatly impact your writing
style and change it for the better forever.
My understanding of writing has grown over the course of the quarter dramastically. Allowed me
to say new perspectives and more ways of writing paper rather than always following the
“hamburger paragraph”. I applied all the writing techniques I learned in my projects and beyond
this course also. I always had this idea of how a introduction should be always short and how a
paper should always have five paragraphs, but I learned that there should not be one way of
writing anything. My writing style changed so much compared to my high school days. I have
more freedom of what I can write and I am the one to decide my style of writing. There is no
wrongs in writing.
I think the greatest strength that I have as a writer is that I am very creative on how I approach
my writing. I am able to call this my strength after reading Elbow’s “Teaching Two Kind of
Thinking”. Elbow taught me how there two different thinkers and how they approach writing a
paper. I was able to incorporate both first and second order thinking to improve my paper.
Through creativity and logical planning of what a paper should be like, I learned that I have the
creativity of making my papers interesting to read. In my writing project three, my translation of
“Ultralight Beam” into a testimony was very amusing to read as the translation starts with “Can I
get a Hallelujah!”. I was able to put myself as Kanye speaking about his testimony and the
creativeness of picking out words he would use if he had to give a testimony.
A weakness in my writing is the grammar and writing too much, to the point where some of my
writings are redundant. I noticed this a lot in writing project one as I have been talking over and
over about the what happened in Douma. Grammar has always been my kryptonite since I started
writing. I would always get paper back with a lot of grammatical mistakes and I continue to see
this now, but a lot has improved from the past. I also tend to repeat what I say often in my
papers. No readers want to read the same thing or proving the same thing over and over again
because it is redundant. However, I have been working on my grammar and excessive use of
repeating the same thing a lot. I have seen less errors in my grammar because I proofread my
essays quite a lot and have peers read over my papers to make sure that my grammar is correct. I
have also been trying to revise every paper I wrote to shorten or combine sentences in order to
stop repeating the same topics. I have been taking a lot of action and practices in order to turn my
weakness into my strengths.
If I had more time in this WRIT 2, I wish we were able to read books in class and write more
papers to improve my writing because practice makes perfect. I want to be able to read more
books in order to grow more as a writer. I also wanted to write more papers even though it is
stressful, I am able learn more as a I write. Overall, I just want to learn how to write in my own
style, but correctly. That takes time and a lot more papers to write in order for me to find my own
style of writing. Writing two has made a huge impact in my college experience here at UCSB. I
will be able to use what I learned here and use them in other classes. Not only that, I learned so
much as a college student.
Sincerely,
Justin Song
Works Cited
Elbow, Peter. “Teaching Two Kinds Of Thinking by Teaching Writing.” Embracing Contrarie:
Explorations in Learning and Teaching. 2014. Rpt. Writing 2, Comp Dr. Rone. ON:
University of California, Santa Barbara, 2014. 1722. Print.
Scott McCloud, Making Comics New York: Harper, 2006.
Stedman, Kyle. “ Annoying Ways People Use Sources.” Writing Spaces . Vol.2. WAC
Clearinghouse. 24256. Writing Spaces 2. Digital file.