Sonya Adler

WRIT 2 Bocchino
12/11/20
Learning To Love Writing

At the beginning of the fall quarter, I was nervous to jump into an intensive writing class,

especially because I hadn’t seriously written since my junior year of high school. I felt rusty in

my writing and I knew my old habits of wordy, long sentences and poor word choice would

come back. I hadn’t read much over the summer and my final English class in high school didn’t

include much reading either, so I had also backtracked in my reading skills. Fortunately, by the

second week of the quarter, we were already reading an article called “How To Read Like A

Writer” by Mike Bunn and “Backpacks and Briefcases” by Laura Bolin Carroll which taught me

that “that there are three parts to understanding the context of a rhetorical moment: exigence,

audience, and constraints.”1 This lesson definitely shaped my writing to have a more specific

view of what I need to accomplish in my essays. These were the first readings that opened my

eyes to the importance of reading from the audience’s perspective and objectively thinking about

the rhetoric of the writing, quickly bringing me into the swing of Writing 2.

Throughout the quarter my writing process has become much more clear to me. I have a

good amount of organization in my process while also being able to incorporate information

from outside sources and knowledge. Before the first writing project, I felt a bit blindsided and it

was difficult for me to get organized fast in order to complete this significant assignment. I felt

that the project builders in both of the writing projects were great ways to organize my ideas

before writing an entire essay. I found these to also be a great tool to look back on while writing

my essays. What helped me the most while preparing for writing these essays, however, was

1 Laura Bolin Carroll, “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps toward Rhetorical Analysis,” in Writing Spaces 2: Readings on Writing,
Volume 2 (Anderson: Parlor Press, 2010), pp. 45-57, 48.
reading the essays in Starting Lines similar to the one I was going to write like “Views On Mass

Incarceration From Different Disciplines” for writing project 1 and “The Puzzling Nature Of

Academic Articles: An Analytical Comparison Between Crossword Puzzles And Academic

Writing” for writing project 2. These essays both gave me clarity on the type of structure and

organization I needed to bring to my own writing and also gave me ideas on what specific details

were important enough to incorporate and what I didn’t need to include like repeating or filler

sentences. I didn’t know what discourse communities were before our lessons on them in the first

weeks of the quarter and they definitely improved my writing. From the reading “Understanding

Discourse Communities” by Dan Melzer, he says, “I didn’t understand that each teacher was

trying to act as a representative of the discourse community of their field. I was a new member of

their discourse communities, and they were introducing me to the genres and conventions of

their disciplines.”2 After reading about discourse communities and understanding their purpose, I

understood what they were and how important it was to understand their perspectives in order to

appeal to them and to learn how they appeal to their readers. The major change in my writing

style has been to put more focus on the audience than me, the writer. By focusing more on the

rhetoric I need to use to capture my specific audience, I found I was better able to write an

effective essay using specific structure, jargon, and phrasing.

In the first writing project, I originally felt disorganized. I wasn’t used to writing a paper

this long and I needed to make sure the reader and I were both able to understand my fast-paced

and sometimes jumbled thoughts on the subject. I set out to write my paper and finished it with

enough time to really go back and edit. However, in my revisions, I found that two parts of my

essay were too similar to be two different sections. These sections were comparing the structure

2 Dan Melzer, “Understanding Discourse Communities,” in Writing Spaces 2: Readings on Writing, Volume 2 (Anderson: Parlor
Press, 2010), pp. 100-115, 106.
of the two disciplines in writing and comparing the evidence that each of the disciplines used. I

decided to combine these two sections and incorporate the body paragraphs on the evidence into

the ones comparing the structure as a whole. This worked really well and made my essay more

clear, and I was also able to eliminate lots of areas that were too similar to each other. The

second major structural change I made in my essay was that I brought my mention of discourse

communities in the conclusion into its own body paragraph. I knew in my original essay that I

should thoroughly compare the different discourse communities, but I thought putting it in the

conclusion was enough. Clearly, it was not, so I took my comparison of the discourse

communities of the two disciplines out of the conclusion and made it its own body paragraph.

This provided a good wrap up to the comparisons of my essay and created a good segue into my

conclusion. The final major change I made in the revision process was that I made the thesis

more argumentative. My original thesis was not able to be argued one way or the other. This

change was a challenge for me in my writing and at first, made my thesis too wordy, but then

made it more clear. These three major pieces of feedback were probably the most helpful in

revising my essay and restructuring it to create a more condensed and clear piece of writing.

When editing other people’s essays I saw that many people made one combined paragraph for

both analyses of the disciplines for each comparison they made, which I thought made the

paragraphs drag on and become too long. Because of this, I made sure to keep my paragraphs of

each of the disciplines separate, which made it clearer and easier to read. I found in the revision

process of my first writing project that it was most helpful to first edit the structural components

of the essay that needed changing before going back and looking at the sentence structures and

more specifics of the essay. Because I found this to be the most effective in my first revision

process, I did the same when revising my second writing project.

 When starting my second writing project, I first read through the journal article I was

translating and highlighted the most important and interesting parts that I wanted to include in

my newspaper article while also finding simpler ways to write their academic jargon. This was

the most helpful part of the translation process for me and made it very simple when writing the

non-academic article. The revision process of my translation was much smaller. I made the small

superficial edits and read an online newspaper article provided by my TA, Allison Bocchino, but

didn’t feel like I needed to make any major changes in it. When continuing onto part two of my

writing in the second writing project, the reflection, I looked at all the questions I needed to

answer in the project descriptor and structured my essay around those. Because I do not like to

procrastinate and I wanted to get my essay done without having to cram it at the end, I didn’t

wait for more resources before I started writing. Later in the week, we read similar essays to the

reflection we were supposed to write in Starting Lines. After reading these essays I realized that I

had written my entire reflection with the wrong structure in mind and had to go back and rework

my entire essay. I didn’t find this to be too difficult because I knew exactly what I wanted my

essay to say and look like and I already had all the information I needed. During the revision

process of this essay, however, I faced more difficulty. Similar to what was helpful in the

revision process of my first writing project, I first looked at the structure I needed to change in

this essay and fixed the little structural issues like merging two paragraphs, but still couldn’t find

anything major to change. This is when I reached out to the CLAS tutors to take a more objective

perspective on my essay. From my CLAS tutor, I saw that I could work on adding the “because”

in my transition and topic sentences and making them more comparative throughout my essay

which was helpful and definitely gave it more flow. Finally, I was able to go back through my

essay and look at the details of the sentences and what the specifics were that I needed to change.
I really did like the original structure of my essay so I didn’t want to change too much of that

other than two paragraphs that I merged together. What I really did find the most helpful in this

part of the revision process was getting a new perspective on the flow of my writing from a

CLAS tutor.

Both of these writing projects made writing much more casual for me and easier to both

understand and conquer. At the beginning of this quarter, I was timid about my writing, but now

I feel much more confident in my ideas and my ability to structure an essay and look at it

objectively. I feel that as a writer I do still have many things to improve upon, one of them being

my word choice. I have found that throughout this quarter I have been able to make my sentences

less wordy but I want to be able to come up with interesting alternatives to otherwise boring

words. I feel like I can do this by continuing to keep writing a constant in my education and also

by reading more. In the near future, I am more excited to take writing classes than I was about

taking this class a few months ago and I am more willing to incorporate it into my future too. I

feel that I was also really able to find my individuality as a writer and find what styles best fit

what I want to say in my writing. I now realize that I like writing in short and more powerful

sentences rather than longer wordy sentences which is still a challenge for me and something that

I need to stay aware of. I also found that throughout my writing process I need to stay organized

in order to create an effective piece of writing. This includes writing down everything that comes

to mind so I don’t have a shortage of ideas while also keeping it organized and creating an

outline for the structure of my essays. This is why I enjoyed that this final writing project

included the revision matrix so I could keep track of my revisions while also making it much

easier to go back and see what I changed and how effective it was.
 Sources Cited

Bunn, Mike. “How to Read Like a Writer.” Essay. In Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing,
Volume 2, 71–85. Anderson: Parlor Press, 2010.

Carroll, Laura Bolin. “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps toward Rhetorical Analysis.” Essay. In
Writing Spaces 2: Readings on Writing, Volume 2, 45–57. Anderson: Parlor Press,
2010.

Grisco, Maggie. ““The Puzzling Nature Of Academic Articles: An Analytical Comparison

Between Crossword Puzzles And Academic Writing.” Essay. In Starting Lines:
An Anthology of Student Writing - University of California, Santa Barbara, 148-
151. Hayden-McNeil, 2020.

Melzer, Dan. “Understanding Discourse Communities.” Essay. In Writing Spaces 2: Readings

on Writing, Volume 2, 100–115. Anderson: Parlor Press, 2010.

Rajesh, Sanjana. “Views On Mass Incarceration From Different Disciplines.” Essay. In Starting
Lines: An Anthology of Student Writing - University of California, Santa
Barbara, 85-89. Hayden-McNeil, 2020.