Lingxi Wu

Writing 2

TA Tymoteusz Chajdas

Portfolio Reflective Letter

Due December 6, 2019

Dear TA Tymoteusz Chajdas,

Before this class, I have never been confident about my own writing skills since I am not

a native English speaker. I have taken some Linguistics classes for international students but all

those classes were mainly on grammar and reading. They only focused on the basis of writing

but never taught the entire process to write a good essay. Going into Writing 2, I was very

nervous and worry if I could do well in this class. But now I can say that my writing skills have

improved after taking this class and I am proud of what I have written this quarter.

Finishing all the classes, I found the class focuses on a theme, Genre. This is one of the

big thing I learn from this class. Genre is truly around us and in the article in the reader

“Navigating Genres,” Kerry Dirks gives the definition, “Genre functions as a social action and

you can predict how they function rhetorically.” In other words, Genre is what authors use to

attain his or her certain goal with specific conventions under a particular rhetorical situation. So

we need to change our way of writing when we are writing in different genres to make it proper

for the audience to read. I have never thought about changing my writing styles when I wrote in

different genres. I even write an academic essay in the first order in my Writing Project 1 that I
“force” my audience to agree with my argument. But after knowing this, I tried to think what my

audience need to read in all my Writing Projects.

Another thing I learned from this class is how to pick my topic. In former Linguistics

classes I have taken, my professors always gave me the topic or asked for my opinion on certain

topic. However, in this class, the three Writing Projects only gave me a direction of writing and I

need to find what I wanted to write. I was confusing and had no idea. In “Ten Ways to Think

about Writing: Metaphoric Musings for College Students,” Shelley Reid encourages us to write

what we are passionate about. So I follow this advice and pick what I interested in as topic. Take

the two essays in my portfolio as example, I wrote about the writing materials of life of my most

admired person, Mr. Steve Jobs in Writing Project 1 and the language of my major,

Mathematics, in Writing Project 1. This really make my writing process easier since I know well

about these topics and willing to work hard for them.

I also remember that the most difficult part of this class, Writing Project 2. I have never

written any research paper before so I have no idea about how to write it. Mike Bunn showed me

how to do it in his article “How to Read Like a Writer.” He says, “The idea is to carefully

examine the things you read, looking at the writerly techniques in the text in order to decide if

you might want to adopt similar (or the same) techniques in your writing.” So I found a research

article in mathematics through the library database (I also learned this in this class) and figure

out how to show the reader what my research is.

Then I want to reflect on my editing of portfolio versions of both Writing Project 1 and 2.

For Writing Project 2, I have done well and got a nice score so I did not edit it a lot. I mainly

worked on the language to make it more academic. Also, it is a research paper so I simplified all

the redundant parts to make it easier for my reader to understand. But for Writing Project 1, I had
a lot to improve so I spent most of time on this essay. The argument of this essay is not

convincible because of my misunderstanding of biography. I thought biography based on

interview with the celebrity can act the same function as autobiography. So I made the argument

that biography can show what the celebrity thought when certain events happened in his or her

life. However, biography does not have this function. This makes a big flaw in this essay. So I

give a new argument that “biography would be the best way to get to know a celebrity's story

while the left two genres have flaws in either ethos (credibility), pathos (emotion) or logos

(logic).” In this way, I can analyze the flaws of website article and eulogy systematically and

make the whole structure of the essay coherently. I also worked on the language to make the

essay less conversational and subjective. In the former version, I even used “I” to show my

process of searching information. But it is unnecessary so I transferred it in to objective way of

expression.

In this ten-week class, I also have learned a lot like using Project Builders as tools to keep

away from flaws in topics to understand the prompt and avoid digressing from the topic;

searching for sources on library database rather than Google. This is a great class and thank you

for the hard work to bring us this high-quality class!

Best,

Lingxi.
 Works Cited

Bunn, Mike. How to Read Like a Writer. 2011, pg. 29-37, Writing 2 Reader.

Dirk, Kerry. Navigating Genres. 2010, pg. 1-7, Writing 2 Reader.

Reid, Shelley E. Ten Ways To Think About Writing: Metaphoric Musings for College Writing

Student. 2011, pg. 38-58, Writing 2 Reader.