Aarav Gupta

Professor Britton

Writing 2

01/12/22

Reflective Essay

When I took writing 2, I had very different expectations for the class. All the English classes I

had ever taken placed a heavy emphasis on reading novels, poems, prose and plays and analysing

them using a preconceived template, something that had become an almost prosaic practice for

me. I expected to continue this mundane process in writing 2, but this was not the case. The class

focused more on in-class discussion and understanding the writing process rather than simply

writing an essay to finish an assignment.

I experienced this at the very outset of the class when we read Mike Bunn’s “How to read

like a writer”. Bunn writes that reading like a writer means thinking about authors choices rather

than just “reading for content”. He goes on to say that “when you read like a writer, you are

trying to figure out how the text you are reading was constructed so that you learn how to “build”

one for yourself”. This shifted my focus from skimming through books and articles to understand

the content to looking at how an author’s choice of diction or linguistic technique affected the

message he was trying to convey. Further, this allowed me to understand an author’s choices and

apply them to my own writing to improve its effectiveness. This was especially useful when

starting my WP1 because it allowed me to identify and modify aspects of other scripts that would

be useful for my own video. Furthermore, the exploration of genres was another aspect of

writing that I had never considered important before.

 Coming into this class, genres were simply a classification of movies or books to me, but

after learning of their profundity in writing through Bickmore’s “Genre in the Wild”, they played

an important part in my genre translation in WP1. Bickmore writes that different situations call

for different genres and while certain features of a genre are set in stone, as a writer, we can

adapt and reshape the genre” to respond to a particular situation. When translating a scholarly

article into a new genre, it was important to understand how the features of a particular genre

have an effect on the intended audience. When I chose to translate my chosen scholarly article

into a YouTube video, knowing that this genre appealed to my intended audience of high school

students played an important part in choosing this genre.

The second writing project required identifying and translating a conversation of

academics. When reading through the scholarly articles, it was important to identify the main

argument the authors were presenting in order to compare the conversations being made between

authors. Lunsford’s text “Everything is an argument” taught me that there are various forms of

argument and each of them have a different purpose and are used in different contexts. For

example, some authors presented “arguments of evaluation” in which they conducted a study and

measured their results to a given standard. The purpose of this argument is vastly different from

a “proposal argument”, which presents an issue and suggests further actions on the problem. In

my WP2, I came across both forms of argument in scholarly articles, and by making the

distinction between the two arguments, I was able to shape my presentation of the conversation

effectively.

The revision process is another aspect of writing whose importance I learned of through

this class. Previously, when working on a draft, I focused on improving the accuracy of
grammar, language, punctuation and structure, but after discussing Harris’ “Revising” in class, I

realized that I had to make a distinction between editing (what I was doing) and revision, which

he defines as “rethinking and reshaping what you want to say”. This meant going beyond surface

level improvements of writing such as punctuation and looking back at the purpose of the essay

and changing my writing to effectively convey its purpose. For example, in my WP1, I had

initially omitted quantitative data, but in the revision process I realized that quantitative data

plays an important part in improving the credibility of a study, thus I condensed the quantitative

data into smaller and more understandable graphics which helped provide more detail in my

genre translation. To improve the effectiveness of my blog in WP2, I added more pictures and

added more detail about the authors as part of the revision process.

However, the process of reshaping my writing has been challenging. I struggled with

converting academic jargon into the conversational diction of a blogpost and initially found it

hard to present a conversation while simultaneously implementing features of a new genre in my

WP2. But through this course, the freedom of making your own authorial choices helped me

develop these skills. By being allowed to continuously rethink my work over the course of this

class as well as having the flexibility to be creative with my writing, I have been able to

experiment with different genres and writing styles and grow as a writer.
Works Cited

Bickmore, Lisa. “Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre within Rhetorical

(Eco)Systems.” Open English SLCC, Open English @ SLCC, 1 Aug. 2016,
https://pressbooks.pub/openenglishatslcc/chapter/genre-in-the-wild-understanding-genre-
within-rhetorical-ecosystems/.

Bunn, Mike. “How to Read like a Writer.” Google Books, The Saylor Foundation,
https://books.google.com/books/about/How_to_Read_Like_a_Writer.html?id=k4RPAgAA
QBAJ.

Lunsford, Andrea A., and John J. Ruszkiewicz. Everything's An Argument. Bedford/St.Martin's,

2022.

Harris, Joseph. “5: Revising.” Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts, Utah State University
Press, Logan, 2017.