UWP

001

Zifeng Li

Reflection Essay

Dear Sophia:

First of all, I have to admit UWP1 is the most unusual writing course Ive ever taken in

college. Instead of focusing on specific writing technique or writing exercises, this course

showed me how to approach all writing fields and even beyond.

The ultimate goal of this course for us is to learn how to achieve self-reflective while we are

writing. By doing the activities such as writing cover memos, the reflective journals and doing

the peer reviews, what we really practiced is the universal method of writing a successful essay.

For example, I originally thought that writing the cover memo both for instructors and the peer

reviewers is just for making them easier to read my draft and help the them to give suggestion to

the writer. It now occurs to me that this process is also for me to reevaluate the draft through

identifying the purpose, intention and possible strength and weakness of my article myself and

when I do that, the improvement of my thinking process is already happening and this can be

directly represented on my essay. All of these process means to improve my brains

metacognition process, which is learning how to learn. The assignments you gave us on this

course are the perfect platforms to practice all these methods.

Our first assignment is the literacy narrative. It seemed like it only talked about my memory

of literacy, but what this assignment actually did is making me ponder over the relationship
between my experience of forming literacy and the cognition I have right now. That is how I

cognize anything around me or communicate with anyone around me is formed by my literacy

past. This assignment actually showed that it is ones ways of read and speak that actually make

who he is.

My topic in this assignment is how my experience of giving speeches in my high school

changed my understanding of communicating with others by speaking. During the revision

process of this assignment, you pointed out that there is a deviation from the main topic when I

mentioned the differences between connecting to the audience using a speech and using an

essay. After I read through my essay again, I did find some incongruity in the last paragraph. I

found that my intention was to make a comparison between these two ways and emphasize that

my understating toward how to make a successful speech is more comprehensive after these

events, because originally I thought these means of communicating including giving a speech is

just as same as writing an essay. So what I changed is to write more details about the

relationship between these two means in the body paragraph and more focus on my change of

understanding of communicating by speeches. By tracking the intention of my thought, which is

a process of self-reflective writing, I fix the incongruity at my ending part. Im sure you will see a

more integrated literacy narrative after.

After exploring my own experiences of literacy using the genre of personal essay, the

research project of discourse community leaded me to more extensive writing fields and

different genres. In the transition between the two assignments, I learned different rhetorical
conventions may apply to different genres. For example, a personal essay like my literacy

narrative need my personal stories as evidence to support my thesis, but a research project may

need me to do secondary research searching for more scientific information to backup my

argument. The field I chose is the online community reviews and my argument is that the genre

of reviews is easily to be extreme and this can cause some negative effect onto the online

consumption environment.

In the peer review session, I received some comments saying that one of paragraph talking

about how companies are using these extreme reviews to manipulate market environment

doesnt really match my argument Im making. So I integrated that paragraph into the one

talking about the negative effect and simplified the part specifically taking about the methods

these companies are using, which made the whole passage more focused on the topic of

discourse community. At the conference with you, you pointed out that I didnt explicitly show

this phenomenon is related to the field of writing study and discourse community. When I

revised my draft again, I found that this is because I didnt clearly consider who will be the

audience of my article. So I reconsidered the potential audience of my essay and made some

changes. My major audiences should be the people who are interested in writing studies. In

order to relate to that field, I need to add more connections to the field of discourse community.

So I concluded that the phenomenon I stated in the article is caused by the divergence between

the goal interpreted by the potential customers, which is providing objective information and

help them make decisions, and the goal interpreted by customers who actually write them,
which is just an approach to express their subjective feelings after using the products. The

connection is, this idea of the goal of one discourse community is critically important because it

defines the whole community and when this goal cannot be maintained uniformly between its

members and its outsiders, confusion and negative impacts may happen. This made the whole

article much better because its content now focuses on group of people and its more relevant to

the topic. The improvement I made is the result of doing rhetorical analysis to the article. I

learned that reconsider the audience and purpose of an essay can often keep all the words on a

right track. I believe you will read a research project that is much more related to the writing

study later.

After all these work we have down in UWP1, it occurs to me that the purpose of these

reflective activities and these assignments is to make us more successful in writing different

genres of articles in different situations. The idea of metacognition and this method of self-

reflective writing can give us the ability to learn to write all types of article when there possibly is

not an instructor around to help me. What Ive learned this quarter is learning itself and the

efficient learning mechanism of our brain. By practicing the methods like doing rhetorical analysis,

having self-reflective process and learning different conventions, I now have the essential tool to

achieve metacognitive learning, which can help me master different kind of area, even beyond

writing. This is the reason why I think this course is so different, because what Ive learned are not

just some writing techniques, but the universal way of studying which can be applied to all kinds

of area.