Reflective Letter 1

Dear Valentina,

Despite being in a major where the assignments are primarily writing, this course scared

me. I was never confident with my writing and believe that in all my past years of writing, I’ve

been lucky enough to just pass by. This wasn’t the traditional writing class I was expecting and

like you had described it, it was all about writing theory. To use writing as a tool and as a muse

rather than a formula. Ironically, this course has actually improved my writing without learning

to use a formula and practicing this but, understanding rhetorical situations.

What I learned specifically was the definition and usage of writing and what it takes to be

an author. This quarter we were asked to respond to the same prompt, what is the definition of

writing and connections among key terms, three times. The first response reflected my attitude

towards writing which was one that was scared and structured. However, from the second

response I had started using abstract definitions and words such as audience, author, response

which were more objective than past words that included: structure, thesis, word choice. My

broadening idea of writing continued as I learned about it being a response to a rhetorical

situation. An class activity in particular was when we identified a murder case and had to write a

story about it in an assigned genre. It was new to see different genres, but to also notice that they

still conveyed the same message. It was just based on the audience. Lastly, the concept of my

writing adding to a conversation made me take a step back to analyze the context of my work

(Rosenberg, 2011). Not only is writing a response to a situation, but also to an ongoing

conversation. It made me rethink the significance and usage of sources. Overall, this has made

my writing abilities flexible. From this point on, I can use writing strategically to create work

that is the most effective and efficient.

Reflective Letter 2

In terms of writing project 1, there are many revisions I’ve decided to make from

everything I learned including class discussions, feedback, and more material from later in the

quarter. One of the main points of revision was the awkwardness of the transition as pointed out

by my fellow classmates. The podcast sounded less of a conversation and more like I was just

trying to fit information into the word count. Luckily, this revision was something I had learned

from writing project 2 that I wanted to incorporate. For example, we had learned about

understanding genre conventions to most effectively make a translation. Although writing project

1 wasn’t a translation, it helped me understand the conventions of a podcast. For example, I

added more context to the podcast by making the introduction longer. I also made revisions while

reading the script out loud and added words like wait, okay, and transition words like

furthermore. Also, as discussed in class, sometimes writing makes sense in our head but not

within the writing. Feedback from my classmates helped me make changes when something was

obviously not clear like my wording when trying to describe the boundaries for plagiarism. A

strength with this writing project would be the uniqueness of the formatting of a podcast. The

fact that it was hosted by college students also made it easier for me to write it and that was

reflected in the naturalness of the writing.

In terms of writing project 2, many of the revisions were based on peer feedback of

general issues of certain conventions and lacking specificity. The translation itself received great

feedback which only required small additions of extra tabs to make the translation more realistic.

This can be seen with the donation tab. For the reflection however, some of the main feedback as

well as issues was the lack of specific examples which stemmed from the choice of tone. After

being able to read my fellow classmates' work and rereading the passage from Starting Lines, I

realized that my writing was extremely stiff with word choice and overall formality. To fix this, I
Reflective Letter 3

added my personal experience with music within the introduction paragraph as well as the

analogy of putting myself in someone else’s shoes. And through this it was easier for me to

incorporate examples, because it flowed better with the surrounding writing. You can see an

example of this with my explanation of connotation. I also became more specific with who my

audience was. One of the most important parts of translation is understanding your new

audience. By adding parents and people actively seeking out treatment, I was able to justify my

conventions. On the other hand, the strength with this writing project would be the use of multi

modality. I was able to acknowledge the, “ beliefs, values, and demographics of your intended

audience as well as the likelihood that unintentional audiences will interact with your text”

(Gagich, 2020).

Some areas I’d like to continue to learn and improve are more conventions. I had still

gone into the class with the expectations that I would like to improve on my writing in terms of

grammar, word choice, and overall structure. I think one of the weeks with the most takeaways

was when we learned about concision, multimodality, and first/second order writing. I would like

to continue to explore these areas so I have writing that is not only effective and efficient but also

achieve better quality.

Overall, I’m leaving this class with a whole new perception of writing and how I will be

able to use it in the future. Although my communication classes will still require the standard

structured research paper, my approach has been completely transformed. As an artist, writing

has become a new form of expression and through this class I have learned that it is not only

possible, but unique and effective.

Sincerely,

Rachel Jang
Reflective Letter 4

Works Cited

Gagich, M. (2020). An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing. Writing

Spaces: Readings on Writing, Vol. 3. Parlor Press.

Rosenberg, K. (2011). Reading games: Strategies for reading scholarly sources. Writing Spaces:

Readings on Writing Vol 2, 210-220.