Dear Ms.

Johnson and whomever it may concern,

I, Redick Dun, am writing this letter to introduce my website to you. There are three subsections,

and each section is presenting either my Op-ed article, WP1, or WP2. These writing assignments

are required works for one of my spring courses, Writing 2: Introduction to Academic Writing,

and yes, they have been graded. However, I have not just struggled in front of my laptop

throughout the quarter for those grades; I have learned a lot from this class.

I am a second year student majoring in Psychology & Brain Science and Philosophy. In my

psychology classes, I have written many lab reports in APA style. In my philosophy class, I have

even written long papers addressing those obscure philosophical problems. Before taking

Writing 2, I was already confident in my writing skills and questioned the usefulness of this

class. However, the truth is that what I have learned in this class greatly shifts my writing. I am

no longer the student who only knows how to write lab reports and philosophy papers, but now I

know how to switch between genres.

‘Genre’ was the first term I learned in this class. In the beginning, I thought it was just some

fancy synonym of ‘style’, but after reading related articles on defining ‘Genre’, I found the term

more meaningful. Though they are closely related, A genre is not just a style. As defined in

Bickmore’s article ‘Genre in the Wild’, A genre is a “typified utterance that appears in a

recurrent situation.” What does it really mean? After examining and writing articles in different

genres, I can now give my own definition to the term. A genre, in my perspective, is a pattern

that my potential audiences are expecting to see the ideas presented in, therefore a non-written
agreement between the speaker and the audience. One quotation I have included in both of my

explication essay and literature review is the author has to “determine what this essay might look

like” before starting writing the essay, which is also a one-sentence summary of what I have

learned in this class. From now on, I will always try to identify who my audience is and what

they are expecting to see before starting writing an article.

Things I have learned in this class are not just conceptual knowledge but can be in fact applied to

my recent writing pieces. One major issue in both my explication essay and literature review is

that I have arranged phrases and sentences in a way that is difficult to understand, namely the

clarity issue. For instance, in one sentence of my explication essay, I use ‘[comma] which’ to

introduce a nonrestrictive phrase, and the following phrase, ‘is rarely seen’, is in passive voice.

For anyone who is reading this sentence, it will be difficult to identify which is the subject that

the phrase is describing, and what does this sentence mean. In order to address this problem, I

change the original phrase to ‘ [comma] which is a case that is not likely to happen.’ Although it

seems like I add more words into the sentence, I in fact make the sentence more readable to the

readers. On the other hand, the revision I have made to my literature review article is also a great

example of me applying newly-learned knowledge to actual writing pieces. One major problem

throughout my literature review article is that sentences are much too long. In most cases, the

long sentences could have been divided into two or more sentences, but I connected each piece

of the sentence with semicolons and conjunctions. In my revised version of the article, I simply

separate the sentences into more clear pieces, and the issue has been successfully addressed.

There are definitely more areas that I have revised to polish my articles, which include but are

not limited to: appropriate word choice, tense consistency within sentences, etc. However, I see
addressing the clarity issue as the most important revision that I have made to my explication

essay and literature review.

When revising these articles and arranging them into a portfolio, I realized I would never make it

without the resources from both the course readings and the google slides. In particular, I want to

thank Ms. Johnson for always believing in what I could achieve and giving advice to me.

Therefore, I choose to share my takeaways from the Writing 2 class by presenting my revised

explication essay and literature review on this website. The takeaways are explicitly identified in

this introduction letter, but they are also expressed throughout the writing pieces. I hope you,

while exploring other elements on the website, also enjoy reading the writing pieces. It would be

even better if you could learn more about language acquisition and multilingualism!

All the best,

Redick Dun