Translation of Academic Essay to Educational Blog

Erick Loza

Writing Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

Professor Valentina Fahler

September 2, 2020
 Analysis of Genre Translation

Education varies from all aspects as it does not have to be academic to be taught. The

beauty of it is that anyone can take upon the role of educator due to the range in topics that can

be learned. You learn some of the biggest lessons from people you least expect it from.

Therefore my goal is to take this traditional essay regarding "shitty first drafts" and convert it

into an educational blog from my perspective and codifying it through "memes" to social media

savvy students. This is my chosen audience because I identify with this discourse community. I

want to freely express knowledge and empathy regarding the difficulty of first drafts without

formally discussing this familiar feeling. This is a more appropriate approach for this community

because, during college work, a blog with the intention of laughter will be easier to both follow

and retain. This topic is also especially relevant to this demographic, as most college students

have experienced a first draft's frustration.

I chose to target college students for my audience because writing proper drafts is

a skill that we are already expected to possess. I believe it is necessary to normalize shitty first

drafts among incoming first-year students. Once students overcome this disheartening obstacle,

writing evolves into a lifelong skill that is continually improving. Many students whose first

language is not English can easily be discouraged by the very wordy article written by Anne

Lamott. This blog's primary purpose would be to present the topic to appeal to readers from all

walks of life.

A blog involves many characteristics: a short read, eye-pleasing, humorous, and relatable.

Even though this directly opposes the norms of a scholarly essay, Lamott had many easily

transferable elements to my updated blog. The versatility of her writing may even be enough to
suggest that she was ahead of her time, as her essay is still being instructed to students in the

twenty-first century. This transferability was the main reason I chose to use "Shitty First Drafts"

by Anne Lamott as my primary source.

The use of the word "shitty" makes it distinctive to any other essay I have encountered.

However, Lamott knew that this was the most accurate term to describe first drafts despite its

lurking on academic acceptability. Although the title is not filtered, Lamott's word choice does

not jeopardize any credibility. This leads to one of the many characteristics I decided to

implement into my translated blog, using the same title. However, I used parentheses around the

word "shitty." As a result, my choice of grammar gives the title a sense of sarcasm. Nowadays,

sarcasm is heavily influenced by humor. In my subcategory titles, I made sure they were not

simplistic but instead made sure they included a mysterious air to the blog. For example, I used

decorative language such as "Unmasking the Myth," to attract the reader's initial attention and

encourage them to continue reading. In addition to appealing titles, I decided to utilize humor in

my blog. Since blogs are characterized as humorous, my choice seemed reasonable. Although

Lamott had implemented humor in her academic writing, this adds another dimension to my

humor to Lamott's translation. I believe her humor is outdated, so it would not be very appealing

to my modern audience. I used modernized humor throughout the language of my blog as well as

themes that can easily be related to by my audience. For example, I decided to reference Twitter

as one of my analogies regarding how complicated it might be to tweet. Twitter is a top-rated

social media platform among college students, and the topic of forming that perfect tweet is

much more intriguing to my audience.

 The exclusion of some of Lamott's writing techniques was just as purposeful as the

inclusions. At first, I felt like I had to use many of her phrases and idioms to address it. However,

I soon realized this method would become lost upon my audience as her word choice is

antiquated. Therefore, instead of quoting her, I paraphrased her words in specific subdivisions of

my blog. For the most part, the shift in meaning and semantics was a personal choice as a

translator. For example I point out “STEM majors who can survive Ochem but can not write a

paper to save their lives”. This is a joke that is widely discussed in the twitter community from

students across all majors. Therefore, a source like Lamott's essay is hard to pick out what to use

and what not to use, but I, in the end, took her overall point and made it into mine.

One reason behind choosing a blog as my genre is because they are heavily dependent on

multimodal composal. Multimodal composal is a concept that interests me; therefore, in my

search for a new genre, I made sure I could use more than merely just the linguistic mode)—like

mentioned before, I was seeking to use modes such as visual, spatial, and even audible. (Gagic

2020) Even though my blog could not encompass all modes, it did include linguistic, visual, and

spatial. The linguistic mode was ideal for explaining shitty rough drafts because there are just so

many images to express. Also, I included popular, modern terminology so I can attract my

intended audience. Then, for the visual mode, by merely adding a couple of images that add to

the subject, I made it enjoyable and even funny to view.

Although we are college students, it always puts a smile on our faces when a piece of the

text includes an image. The spatial mode had more significance to my genre as blogs are meant

to have a unique format that will be eye-pleasing to the audience. As well as pleasing, it also has

to be professionally appropriate because I am still addressing an academic topic. One thing I

made sure to add was my usernames to popular social media platforms. This is significantly

approachable to savvy college students because it is all about following each other and just being

updated on what goes on in our daily lives. The most significant change I implemented was the

length of my blog. Lamott's essay was very long, even though I was interested in becoming hard

to read the whole thing without skipping some lines. Blogs are generally short in-text and space,

so I made my included text exceptional to stand on its own. Although the transition was difficult,

I thought I presented the blog exceptionally well.

Challenges, like anything, there will be plenty. Especially in my case, it had to be

addressing the topic of shitty first drafts by using mainstream terminology. At first glance, I

wanted to use as much information from my primary source as possible, but this contradicted my

genre's translation. In the end, though, I believe I was able to write a reliable blog that will help

my peers have an easing approach to first drafts and how to write one. I decided to use bullet

points in the advice section on writing a draft because I want my readers to find what they are

looking for through skimming without reading the whole thing, a standard time-saving tool used

by college students. My goal of having individualism in my sections was addressed by fixing the

other issues I encountered. I wanted the blog to stand on its own and written well enough to

breeze through it.

Overall, my goal and approach to writing this translation changed the more I wrote. In the

beginning, I was nearly going to base my translation on the language Lamott utilized in her

essay. However, I decided that a more modern language was the most effective way to approach

my target audience. Attempting the letter to the reader activity was a great tool to effectively

choose the right decisions for my overall purpose(Gile, 2020). The beauty of drafting and
revising is that there will always be space for improvement. Therefore it will never hurt to take a

second look at your draft just like this one as I hope it turns out to be "fine, sometimes even

funny and weird and helpful." (Lamott)

 References

Gagich, M. (2020). ​An introduction to and strategies for composing multimodal composing.
Writing spaces. http://writingspaces.org/node/1712

Giles, S. L. (2010).​ Reflective writing and the revision process: What were you thinking?
Writing Spaces http://writingspaces.org/essays/reflective-writing-and-the-revision

Lamott, A. (1994). ​Bird by bird: Some instructions on writing and life​. Pantheon.