Dear Ms.

Bamert,

My understanding and skills of writing have evolved and changed a lot after learning a quarter of
UWP1 course. Some of my understandings toward essays were overthrown, and some of my
writing and reading techniques were improved.

In the first week, I was introduced to some place-based narrative essays. In these essays, authors
focused on one place. They described things happened around that single place to tell stories that
shows how their literature was shaped and influenced. Then, I also read essays that introduced
writing and revising strategies, and commenting techniques. The most useful essays I found were
the Lamotts Shitty First Drafts and Sommers Revision Strategies. The former ensured me that
every one writes bad drafts, including these who are experts in writing. Lamott gave me the
confidence to write because one of the reasons I was afraid of writing was that I worried my
essays would look bad. The later provided detailed steps or guidelines of revision. Sommers
compared the revision methods used by students and experienced writers. Students mainly
focused on the lexical level by changing words or sentence structures during revision while
experienced writers focused more on the content that sometimes they would cross out one or
more paragraphs which seems insane to student writers but turned out really helpful for the
fluency, emphasis of the main ideas, and readability.
Moreover, I understand more of the rhetorical techniques by reading Backpacks vs. Briefcases
by Carroll. In this paper, author mentioned three major techniques, logos, pathos, and ethos.
By understanding the functions and usage of the three techniques, I am able to analyze and
understand more of a writing than before. For example, I analyzed an advertisement of babys
wipes and identified ethos used by the company. Carrolls essay prepared me for all the papers
I will be analyze and reading in the future by teaching me to identify the audience, grasping the
main ideas, finding the intentions by analyzing the rhetorical techniques used by the authors. In
addition, I also learned a more proper way to write reflective essays and revise papers by
studying Giles Reflective Writing and the Revision Process. Giles summarize the core of the
reflective writings and revision. Also, Giles presented her ideas of what should be included in the
reflective writings to better revise the papers. By following her methods, I find writing reflective
essays, or cover memos, much more useful that I can identify more disadvantages of my writings
alone; and peer reviewers can give me more substantial advices and comments based on the
more detailed cover memos I wrote to them. Furthermore, we discussed about our own
definitions of genre, discourse community, speech community, cover memo, research
paper, and etc. I was encouraged to explore different genres, discourse communities.

While reading the essays written by others, I learned and utilized the writing techniques and
knowledge to construct my two essays: a place-based narrative essay and a research paper.

1. A place-based narrative essay

I used knowledge learned from the place-based narrative essays and essays about revision to
construct my first place-based essay. The most improvement I made was during the revision of
my second draft of Place-based Narrative Essay. I did not change the structure or the topic on the
second draft compare to the first draft for I did not think deeper and much of what was my
expectation of this Place-based Narrative Essay. However, after I have put it aside for two
weeks, I decided to read it again. This time, I read again and again. At start, I decided to add
more details to each examples (total of three examples in the essay at that time) to ensure my
ideas can be conveyed to audiences better and more precisely. Nevertheless, after I read the
essay twice when I finished improving the first example, I decided to take out the other two
examples from my essay, just like the experienced writers did in the Sommers essay, which was
a major move because it would cost me losing two main paragraphs and my earlier topic at once.
Surprisingly, I was pleased looking at the new essay. It appeared that the two examples and
points was a great load. My new essay was more organized and the topic was more solid.

2. A research paper of a discourse community

I was fortunately provided of some research papers written by others and essays written by
professionals or scholars that illustrated and suggested what made of a good research paper. By
reading The Aims and Process of the Research paper written by Robert A. Schwegler and
Linda K. Shammoon, I realized that my previous opinion of how to a research paper was wrong.
My past research papers were made of tons of information that I gathered with little of my
opinions and thoughts. However, Schwegler and Shammoon pointed out that the aim of a
research paper is to argue, to explain and stated the points by analyzing the data gathered. They
argue that a research paper should always focus on the thoughts and ideas derived from
information, not on showing audiences how many data or researches the author have done. In
addition, by reading some research papers, I had a more specific recognition of what should a
research paper look like. They were all written seriously, abjectly, and academically. These
research papers thoroughly explained every aspects or terms that could be confusing to the
audiences. Also, they showed how they have developed their arguments and results by analyzing
the research and sources gathered step by step. Consequently, I tried to be like their essays when
writing my research paper of a discourse community. Unlike usual, I did more thinking and
analyzing of the information and try to organize them into few points to manifest on my paper.
Then I made an effort of summarizing the essential information and examples instead of putting
everything on the paper.

During revision, I realized that I could narrow the range of the topic and audience for more
readability and less confusions. Thus, I changed the direction of my research paper for audiences
who were interested in the Mgt11A course to people who were interested in the effective
pedagogy methods used in the Mgt11A course. I also rearranged the structure accordingly.
Consequently, my research paper is tightly related to the topic than before and the object,
Mgt11A, is much fully analyzed.

If I had more time to work on my portfolio, I think I would summarize the information and add
more thoughts to the papers for the essays should present more of the authors thinking not the
objectively observations which anyone could find them online easily.

Reading others works and writing two different modes, or genres, of papers has influenced a lot
on my writing and reading techniques. For now, I am more capable of grasping topics and
convey my ideas to the audience by using variety of rhetorical techniques. Also, I learned better
revision methods in UWP1. I intend to look at and think more of the content level than lexical
level. Thus, I believe achieved learning and utilizing the five goals in UWP1, rhetorical
knowledge, process, knowledge of conventions, research, and metacognition.
In the future, the writing techniques learned from UWP1 allowed me to write better research
papers for knowing what should be focused and what should be supplementary. The reading
techniques learned from UWP1 allowed me to understand easier and read quicker of both
academic and non-academic papers.

Sincerely,
Chenyu Jiang