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Connor Logan

Jessica Zisa

Writing 2

21 March 2023

A Reflection on a Busy Quarter

At the beginning of this class, I considered myself a “functional writer”. This means that I

was a proficient enough writer to make a argument and effectively back it up with evidence.

That is true I am good at writing analytical essays where I prove a point in a highly structured

but rather simple style. What I had failed to account for was the use of genre. The concept of

writing in another genre is not that difficult, you just have to follow the rhetorical devices, and

make it sound similar. Unfortunately, this class showed that turning these simple ideas into a

workable essay is not so easy. So, the learning and growth, more commonly known as hard work

and frustration began.

When WP1 was announced it sounded like fun. I broke the prompt down into two

different problems to solve. First there was the problem of picking a article and breaking it

down to a size that would fit inside a small essay. While this took a while and there was a

learning curve to reading scientific papers effectively it is not that different to analyzing data

that is given and writing about it, which I am comfortable with. The second problem was the

tricky one, I needed to do this in a different genre. To mitigate the difficulty of this task I picked

a genre that I thought would be similar to the essay style that I am so comfortable with. I chose
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the film review video. These had the benefit of including a literal review of the movie, then

analysis of the themes just like the opening paragraphs of a essay but longer.

The peer reviewers did not agree with me. They pointed out that the essay I had written

had good content, but did not sound like a film review. It was too heavy on the analysis, the lack

of pictures made it boring, and because it was a scientific article the theme was listed in the first

paragraph so me summarizing it did not add much.

Having accepted that there would need to be substantial but expected re-writes to

project 1 I moved on to WP2. Unlike WP1 I was not summarizing the content of a paper, I was

listening in on a discourse community within the academic writing community. I started with

grand plans of representing this community as a series of Instagram posts. But with 3 days tell

the project was due and only having a handful of unrelated papers I knew that the amount of

work to make that work would take longer than I had. Finally later that day I stumbled across

my conversation while looking through the citations of a paper. Ironically it ended up being

about citations.

While writing a new problem arose, despite the effort that went into trying to find 5

different papers that all responded to the same question and interacted between each other

the papers did not seem that similar. This meant that it was really easy to go off topic. To deal

with this I turned to the readings for this class. In “Introductions to Primary Research:

Observations, Surveys, and Interviews” Dana Lynn Driscoll lays out what it is like to develop

research questions, “A research question or hypothesis should be something that is specific,

narrow, and discoverable... like if your research question of hypothesis is too broad, your
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research will be unfocused” (Discrolls 158). By limiting my question to just how individual

background effects the way that they use citations the number of responses to this question

were greatly limited. I had a clear researchable question.

Once again the peer review pointed out that the genre I aimed for was not what I ended

up with. While the conversation was well represented the paper as a whole did not sound like

something that a student would write to make a report about. I had a friend look at WP2 before

I turned it in. She helped me with some citation issues and dumb spelling that I had missed. But

they once again struggled to tell me about the genre issues with the paper, William Germano

states it best, “Friends are great, and they’ll tell you that they’re there to help, but be merciful;

not many people can or want to undertake a professional-level response to something written

by a person they know well” (Germano pg.43) Peer review pointed out that neither essay

sounded like the genre that I was aiming for. The solution for both essays was similar, find a

better fitting genre and use more rhetorical devices to make it sound like that genre.

Subtle switches to the genre were relatively easy to brainstorm, but proved difficult to

implement. I had to decide if the paragraph matched the new genre close enough to be

salvaged by changing the way that I phrased things, or just re write it. This was really hard to do

for the first time with WP1 but went smoother with WP2. This is where I have seen the most

improvement over the quarter. I have always done revision work with my essays but it always

happens the same day that the essay was written. The prosses of writing something then taking

a couple of weeks to a month to reflect then revisiting the paper and revising it has been

completely new to me. While it would not have occurred to me to do this on my own I will
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admit to liking the amount of improvement that comes from a perspective change form that

much time away.

I Hope to be able to continue to widen the use of genres that I write in. The difficulty

that I had writing in this way shows my inexperience writing with other genres, thus continued

improvement is needed. But the primary lesson is a old one best put by Buttler “The last word

of the essay is the most important word. Writing is difficult.” (Buttler 143) It is nice to know that

even really good writers understand that putting your thoughts on a page in a coherent fashion

is difficult to do well.

Butler, Octavia E., et al. “Bloodchild and Other Stories.” Octavia e Butler: Kindred, Fledgling,
Collected Stories, The Library of America, New York, NY, 2020.

Germano, William P. “Good to Better.” On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts, The
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2021.

“Introduction to Primary Research: Observations, Surveys, and Interviews.” Writing Spaces:

Readings on Writing, Parlor Press, Anderson, SC, 2020.