Dear Mr.

Wesso:

Wandering through the path of writing in this course, I saw lots of new perspectives

and methods I assimilated and incorporated into the process of academic writing. For

many years, my English writing have been influenced by the conventions of non-

native English education and the norms of informal writing with unclear intentions

and logic. During my writing process in the past, I often tried to express my ideas as

clear as possible. However, for many times I failed to do it because I was unable to

find proper expressions that resembled clear concepts and followed native English

conventions. Furthermore, sometimes when trying to express the ideas clearly, I

abandoned many more important aspects of a writing piece. For example, the sentence

structures and grammar use sometimes appear overly monotonous but sometimes

unnecessarily complex, or even inappropriate in its structure. Also, I seldom used

rhetorical tools to furnish my writing because I lacked the knowledge of proper

rhetorical use. Moreover, My quest for clarity and conciseness sometimes

compromised the richness of my content, leading the articles to to lack details. For

instance, my articles sometimes lacked examples or comparisons and only consisted

of logical reasonings, making the article not understandable and intriguing enough.

An example of such problems can be seen in my first draft of Writing Project 1. When

I write about the scholars’ thoughts and contributions to the field, I paraphrased their

ideas presented in the articles and bridged their ideas with clear sentences, but failed

to provide clearer examples and descriptions that demonstrate their innovativeness

while making it accessible to larger audience. The notion of presenting clear and

logical ideas in writing armed me with tools to guide readers to follow my thoughts

and not feel perplexed, but it also makes my writing monotonous and boring.

Fortunately, after this class, I have witnessed impressive thoughts and techniques to

enrich my academic writing. First, I improved skills of writing with specific genres.

The attachment to a central topic or argument is critical in my past writing practices,

but many times I ignored that specific genres are essential since they create specific

links to the audience, thus intrigues the intended audience’s attention. Just as Dirk

said, “genres require more effort than simply following the rules”, adhering to a

specific genre needs more insight of the needs of the audience and the effect of certain

styles. In the writing class this quarter, I navigated through different genres including

academic texts and informal pieces. On the first writing project, I chose to translate

the academic article into the form of an answer on Quora. During the creation of this

project, I continued adhering to the appetites of my intended audience, which are the

students and scholars seeking to find quick answers on the internet. Due to their needs

for a concise response, I skipped part of the original article that are too professional

and specific, focusing on the key method introduced by the authors that best represent

their innovation. Then I used some informal descriptions to help amateurs better

understand. During my process of creating this project, I had a deeper understanding

of approaches to focus my work on one specific genre and intrigue the audience.

Second, I learned to transform my articles into more exquisite ones through rhetorical

analysis. I learned many of the rhetorical devices before, but their effective
incorporation into my work remained a challenge. Rhetoric serves a vital conduit

between the reader and the author, and it is a realization of the abstract concept of

genres, just like what Carroll said “Rhetoric – the way we use language and images to

persuade – is what makes media work”. Throughout this class, I witnessed different

rhetorical skills and tried to combine them into my actual writing pieces. I used

metaphors to present vivid comparisons to attract readers and help them understand. I

also used parallelism in some writing pieces to strengthen the tone and enumerate

certain examples or effects. In the past I used these rhetorical skills only when writing

literary texts, but during the class I found that integrating them into academic articles

also generate dramatic effects. For example, in writing the reflection of writing

project 2, I described Debeaugrande’s proposition of teaching grammar based on prior

knowledge as a “Declaration of Independence” of the new field, emphasizing his

unique innovation and remarkable influences. Such metaphors and parallelism in my

projects and other pieces of writing equipped me with the path to generate a resonance

with the audience, to provide them with a picture that they can imagine, making them

feel immersed into the environment the article depicted.

Furthermore, during the process of investigating into the materials for project 2, I

deeply assimilated the idea of discourse community conversation in academic

inquiries. When I search through the conversations for my project, I discovered that

there are many interesting connections between different scholars. The scholars

sometimes refer to each other’s works to provides backgrounds and supportive ideas

to their arguments and discuss their thoughts to present new thoughts. In the past, I
knew that there are discussions between scholars in academic papers, but seldom saw

these direct quotations and discussions like a real talk sitting near each other. The

more interesting fact is that sometimes they don’t directly quote each other, but still

express others’ opinions implicitly. Such implicit conversations represent the

interaction of their thoughts and opinions. Their discussion represents a discourse

community described in Melzer’s work, and they demonstrated interesting

intercommunication as described in Melzer’s article. In finishing my writing project

2, I also learned methods to discover the conversations between scholars. It is crucial

in my future academic careers since finding conversations boosts me to discover new

ideas and generate innovative approaches.

During this course, I enhanced abilities to consider more aspects of writing like

genres, rhetoric and logic, and incorporate them into the whole piece of writing.

Moreover, I developed the ability to describe my ideas with richer sentences

containing more details, rather than simply enumerating the sentences strictly

constructed in the outline. In the future, I’d like to investigate deeper into the proper

word and sentence uses that resemble a native English piece and discard the

influences of the conventions of my native language. Furthermore, I hope that

improving my literature skills equip my article with beauty and elegance, enabling

people to read my article with a feeling of comfort besides merely understanding

boring words.

The two projects I proposed in this course are highly linked to my own experience.

For the first project, I chose an article that I read last quarter for a research project.
The article shows an innovative approach that I consider unique in this field, which I

believe worthwhile to introduce to a large audience. I chose the form of a Quora

answer because I believe such a new online forum provides people great efficiency in

grabbing knowledge. They can read through their desired information when they are

taking a rest from work or waiting on a bus to school. These posts on online forums

largely saves people time to acquire knowledge. The forums also grant people great

freedom to edit their answers incorporating their personal style and opinions. I utilize

this genre with high freedom to present the technique with my personal assumptions

of its future. For the second project, I chose the conversation about the instruction of

grammar which also resembles my past experiences. Searching through the ideas

about the instruction of grammar, I reflected upon the time I learned English grammar.

It was the study of grammar that shaped my former understanding of English writing

and personal literature styles of writing. I personally support Debeaugrande’s idea of

building grammar based on the students’ existing oral communication and informal

writing skills, but I prefer to make a few changes in the case of educating English as a

second language students. When teaching non-native speakers, I suppose the

instructors should first immerse them into a real English-speaking environment, then

develop their English speaking abilities first, and, after building proper oral

communication skills, equip them with techniques of formal grammar in a natural

way. In this project, I demonstrated the implicit conversations of scholars via their

articles, which I believe is essential when inquiring about an academic discussion.

Through the two projects, I convey my personal experience and ideas that I suppose
enables you to better communicate with me and understand my endeavors.

Bibliography

1. Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.” Essay. In Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing,

249–62. Parlor Press, 2020. 

2. Carroll, Laura Bolin. “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps toward Rhetorical

Analysis.” Essay. In Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, 45–58. Anderson, SC:

Parlor Press, 2020. 

3. Melzer, Dan. Essay. In Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, 100–115. Anderson,

SC: Parlor Press, 2020.