Dear Reader,

This quarter was by no means a normal one. School is online, I am living at home as a
2nd-year college student, and I am dealing with more family disasters simultaneously than any
person I’ve ever known, all while attempting to cope with my own mental health struggles. So
to say the least, it’s been quite a difficult quarter (and year!). I am proud to say that I not only
got through this quarter, but I finished successfully with an abundance of new knowledge and
techniques to make my writing more effective.
We began this quarter discussing genres, genre conventions, and rhetorical situations.
While I was familiar with the term “genre” in relation to films, television, and books, I had
never thought of different styles of writing (professional email vs. text to a friend vs. short
story vs. comic strip vs. journal entry vs. letter to a loved one) to be entirely different genres
depending on the context of its rhetorical situation. While genre used to primarily refer to the
form and technical structure of one’s writing, Kerry Dirk explains that genres have more
recently become viewed as repeating rhetorical situations that respond appropriately to
commonly encountered circumstances.1 I really appreciate her note that genres should be
thought of as tools to help people accomplish goals in our everyday lives, as well as Amy
Devitt’s thought that genres “have the power to help or hurt human interaction, to ease
communication or to deceive, to enable someone to speak or to discourage someone from
saying something different.”2 This was eye-opening because, until this class, I had never
realized that since I was very young, I have been trained to handle different rhetorical
situations in unique ways. This understanding of genres, genre conventions, and rhetorical
situations was then applied to our first writing project (WP1) where we found a peer-reviewed,
scholarly article about any topic of our choosing and translated it into a different genre. For
this part of my WP1, I translated an academic article from the New England Journal of Medicine
about Generalized Anxiety Disorder into a series of journal entries. We later wrote an
explication essay to analyze and prove the efficacy of our translation as that new genre.
The second half of the quarter was spent learning about Literature Reviews and how to
improve the efficacy of our writing. We discussed proper ways to organize our paper, improve
its flow, and write poignant thesis statements and topic sentences. We utilized all that we
learned when writing our own Literature Reviews. We each carried over our original topic
from our WP1 (which in my case was anxiety and anxiety disorders) to create a thesis-driven
paper analyzing a collection of sources that are usually academic, peer-reviewed sources. Our
Lit Reviews were a bit different than a traditional one as we were required to utilize both
academic and non-academic sources in our paper. We not only had to find two peer-reviewed

1
Kerry Dirk, “Navigating Genres,” in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Vol. 1, ed. Charles Lowe and Pavel
Zemliansky (Parlor Press, 2010), 252.
2
Kerry Dirk, “Navigating Genres,” 252.
scholarly articles from different academic discourses, but also three credible non-academic
sources. A non-academic source could range from a personal, first-hand experience to a series
of Instagram posts to a New York Times or National Geographic article.
Although I feel that I came into this class with fairly strong writing skills, I know that I
can always learn, improve, and be better. My greatest takeaways from this course were two
very specific topics that we covered: concision and using active voice. These are two things
that I have always struggled with in my writing because I can be descriptive/wordy and
long-winded, but it’s because that’s also how I speak, so it’s hard to reel it in sometimes.
Without knowing what active or passive voice was, I learned to write using passive voice in
high school because it can sound formal or professional, but really you have much more
control and strength in your writing if you are using an active voice because you are actively
placing the subject first allowing them to be the focus of the sentence. These were the main
focuses of my final revisions.
My revision process is quite different than most people’s, and overall, revising my
papers can be extremely difficult and stressful for me. When writing my “draft,” I am
practically crafting my entire paper as if I am ready to turn it in immediately after it’s
completed. As I write, I continually edit and revise each sentence until it fits just right. This
makes it much more difficult for me to make any drastic revisions after I am done because I
feel like it is exactly how it should be. This class has forced me to challenge my usual nature
and take a second, third, fourth, and even fifth look back at my paper to see how it can be even
further improved. In my WP1 and WP2 revisions, I mainly focused on making small phrasing
changes and tightening up sentences to make them more concise, as well as attempting to find
sentences that I wrote in passive voice and shift them to active voice. I had a very difficult time
finding where I used passive voice in my papers other than the places that Prof. Johnson noted
because it sounds and looks right to me when I read it. I continue to work this on throughout
my college career as I have to unlearn something that has been so engraved in my writing style
because of my high school English teachers. Reading Prof. Johnson’s suggestions and edits of
my papers were immensely helpful and allowed me to find other places in my papers where I
made similar mistakes or grammatical errors.
This website is the culmination of my writing projects and this course. I created it to
display my final works and highlight my greatest takeaways from Writing 2. I organized and
designed this page to be aesthetically pleasing, as well as well organized and easily accessible. I
hope you enjoy what I have written and learn a bit about your own mental health, or your
perceptions of mental health, in the process!

All the best,

Izzy Adler
 References

Dirk, Kerry, “Navigating Genres,” in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1, edited by

Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, 249-262. Parlor Press, 2010.