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Final Portfolio Reflection Essay

Reflection Essay

During the reading and composing processes in UWP1 course, I have learned much about literacies and met the UWP1 learning outcomes by doing two big assignments. After writing the Literacy Narrative paper, I met learning outcomes of Rhetorical Knowledge, revising and editing Processes and Metacognition. In the Discourse Community project, all five learning outcomes were met.

My Literacy Narrative talks about how my high school English teacher Mr. Wilkins changed me from writing to finish assignments, to something real and meaningful. The learning outcome I reflected in that paper is Rhetorical Knowledge: the concepts of audience, purpose and genre. After the reflection, I got a better understanding of the importance of identifying a specific audience and have a rationale as guidelines of the purpose to compose a better literacy work. Sentences like “this was the first time I wrote a diary that I had a clear specific purpose” shows the pathway I went through to understand these key rhetorical concepts. In terms of genre, I reflected on the effects different genres have on writing by saying that “various text types Mr. Wilkins introduced to me were another useful tool to write purposefully”. In that Literacy Narrative paper, the blog genre and the visual and digital mode were used where I created my own website online to post my work. Through applying rhetorical concepts with a blog, I practiced with short paragraphs, narrative writing and informal language.

Another learning outcome, Processes, was met when I revised my paper five times. Before the workshop of the first draft, I went to my teacher’s office, and got recommendation to edit my introduction paragraph. After reducing repetitive questions that I wrote in the introduction paragraph, I received new advice from peers. My peers asked me to rewrite some confusing sentences and work on transition words between paragraphs. After my teacher read my second draft, she praised the overall quality of my paper and suggested me to revise the organization to make my paper more coherent, and “consider using bold typeface to emphasize important parts of the paper like you might on a blog.” I tried my best to edit according to her feedback, but left confused on how to organize the paper better. 

I brought my paper to a writing specialist at SASC, and she helped me restructure two paragraphs. After that, I came to my teacher’s office to discuss and solve the problem “right now it feels like there are two essays”. Finally, I asked a writing tutor at SASC to revise the grammar of my paper. She corrected lots of mistakes such as changing all “audiences” to “the audience” because audience is a group of people who read my paper. I learned a lot about grammar rules and finished the final revision of my Literacy Narrative. Throughout these recursive processes, I improved my ability and patience on adjusting my composition from different perspectives.

By demonstrating how I met the above two learning outcomes, I also kept consistent with the learning outcome, Metacognition. I did reflect on my composing processes step-by-step by editing my Literacy Narrative paper five times. Also, reflecting on my rhetorical choices is both the aim of my Literacy Narrative and one aspect of revision Processes.

During the composition of my Discourse Community research paper on nutrition professionals, two key rhetorical concepts— genre and discourse community, were understood, in research paper genre and multimodal mode. I focused mainly on the definition of my discourse community, the genres used by members, how the genres shaped the boundaries of the discourse community and members’ communication to the outside.

The most remarkable Processes of this project were conducting primary Research by surveys, secondary Research by reading books, peer-reviewed journals, and then writing out the methods, the results, the analysis, the concluding evaluation and citations, of my primary and secondary research. Some example readings are book named “Nutrition Counseling and Education Skills for Dietetics Professionals”, and article titled “Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities”. To do my primary research, I sent out 10 Google forms to ten people of different backgrounds, asking questions like “do you read food labels on foods you bought? If so, what parts do you most care about?”. These questions helped me learn about how some genres connect the communications between members and non members of my discourse community, and how the differences between their use of the same genres like food labels define the expectations of the members of nutrition professionals discourse community. 

In such a way, another learning outcome, Knowledge of Conventions, was also reached. After collecting and analyzing data from the survey, I learned new knowledge of how “genres for communications between nutritionists and patients are customized”, and how language styles of the genres used by nutrition professionals and “my home discourse community”, the public, were different. 

To achieve the learning goal of Metacognition, I reflected on how my cited readings were tightly related to the topic I explored and the analysis I composed. My peers enhanced my reflection by telling me to “choose representative genres of each category”, and my teacher guided me to “shorten the subheadings” and “demonstrate more on the differences in governments’ and nutritionists’ concern about ‘balance’ on food labels”. The Discourse Community Project was so valuable that it helped me met all five learning outcomes on reading and composing.

In both Literacy Narrative paper and Discourse community project, I wrote cover memos to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of my drafts. In cover memos for the second and third drafts, I demonstrated my learnings from my peers’ and teacher’s feedbacks. All those processes of writing cover memos as well as this reflection essay were remarks of meeting the learning outcome Metacognition.

If I have more time, I would read more scholarly resources about more aspects that nutritionists and the non-members concern differently on food labels. How the differences could further define the members as “gatekeepers” of the discourse community is another possible revision. Except food labels and recipes, I would like to explore on other visual genres used by nutrition professionals, to develop my Knowledge of Conventions better. Also, this reflection essay could have been revised more times if time was available. 

In the future, I will continue the processes of editing many drafts based on feedback from different persons for each paper. Because the recursive processes effectively elevated my papers, kept me to stay patient, scrupulous and taught me a lot. Metacognition will be in my mind too, reminding me of always reflecting on rhetorical choices made and reading and composing processes.

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Final Revised Literacy Narrative

Writing for Something Real

“Why should your essay even exist?” Before Mr. Wilkins, my English language teacher in Grade 11 and 12, taught me how to write in a completely unique way, I never wrote English from these perspectives. When he asked me those sharp and incisive questions during the first week of his class, I didn’t understand any of them but was shocked by how “crazy” and strange this teacher was. None of my past teachers cared so much about the context and real world implications of my writing before him. They smiled at my “assignments” because of my fluent language, logic, and good stories.

Either because English was my second language, or because my English writing styles and habits were Chinglish, I only wrote in English to finish assignments for ten school years. What I was doing when writing in English was actually translating stories from Chinese, writing out my ideas in English, and trying to fill in certain framed formats with thoughts and narratives. The beauty of language, the depth of the thesis, the innovation of structure, and the purpose of my writing are aspects I worked on a lot more in Chinese writing, while English writing was never a literary creation to me. Luckily, such a method of writing continued bringing me good grades with little effort.

The first thing Mr. Wilkins did to change me was teaching me to write for a purpose and a specific audience. One day, he assigned me to read a book named ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird”, and that was the starting point of his influences on my writing. When I wrote the first three drafts, I wrote a letter to myself—Yiwen Bao, just as writing a diary summarizing and reflectioning on my reading experience. This was the “successful” way I wrote letters to myself for the past ten years. But this time, I scored only 3 out of 7! I was definitely surprised and confused but still confident on my old “successful” writing conventions, thus only corrected my grammar errors and added interesting thoughts on the characters.

Then he called me into his office to talk face-to-face. I could clearly see disappointment and discontent on his young face as soon as we made eye-contact. “Who is your audience?”, “What do you truly want to say in this essay?”, “Why should anyone care about what you write?” … several questions were flying out of his mouth, leaving a long silence and an awkward me. I now learned how serious he was about writing and realized my old lazy method of writing just to finish assignments would no longer succeed anymore.

That night I started thinking about ways other than self-talk, to answer the question on what the true aim of my letter could be. He didn’t leave me lost but helped me answer those questions by guiding me to take on a character’s voice and write a letter as this character to herself. We analyzed different characters and their significant plots together, getting a better understanding of the book. While in the past, writing a single piece would only push me to pick up the book once.

My fourth draft was a completely different one: “I” was the 8-year-old Scout in the book writing a letter to my 6-year-old self, to a real audience not a teacher or grader. This was the first time I wrote a diary that I had a clear specific purpose of reflecting on “my” growth in two years and changes of understandings on social justice. After only one written assignment, Mr. Wilkins had already opened a new world of writing for me, a world where writing is a meaningful work that could both help me practice my language skills and enhance my understanding of related readings.

He continued emphasizing the significance of writing for a purpose by asking me to always write a rationale. He taught me that everything I wrote had to have a specific audience in mind and he would ask me to write as many drafts as it took to make my writing meaningful. In rationales, I reflected on my “purpose”, understood the identity of my audience, and thought about how chosen text type, register and language influenced my communication with the audience.  

To help me continue improving on “writing something real”, Mr. Wilkins guided me to care more about my language. In his class, I spent weeks exploring topics on language like “how does the usage of argumentative language change between audio-visual and electronic medium when discussing global issues” and “How does repetition of words affect audiences’ comprehension of the importance of information in a writing”. I got access to new texts such as Robert Frost’s poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. By analyzing them by myself instead of searching for “argumentative language” and “repetition” online, I learned those concepts more in depth and could apply them better in my writing. Also, I was more adept at taking on diverse voices of people: a lecturer, an imaginary future character extended from one in a book; a football fan, etc. Gradually, I regarded my English writing assignments as more serious literacy works.

Various text types Mr. Wilkins introduced to me were another useful tool that helped me write purposefully. Besides letters and diaries, writing eulogies, argumentative essays and speeches enriched my experience of communicating with different audiences, in formal, argumentative, ironic or collaborative registers. And writing in unfamiliar text types pushed me to understand topics and analyzing readings from various perspectives. He even taught me to write pamphlets which I previously thought would never be taught in an English writing class. However, just as getting his idea of practicing speaking like an advertisement designer, I eventually could understand functions of all his writing assignments.

After two years, my view of English writing changed dramatically. English writing is now about true literacy to me, a serious work of not just writing stories and completing sentences, but also lots of analysis, knowledge, skills and talents are required to create fabulous work. In the last semester of high school, Mr. Wilkins marked 7 out of 7 on diary, “greater poverty than nothing to eat”, and praised my construction of paragraphs, recognition of the audience, and use of language which were all specific to the prompt, purpose and audiences.

Since that first letter to myself, I have always been reflecting on whom my audience is, what I truly wanted to say, how my writing could be useful or meaningful to my audience and what the real purpose was when writing. In a good paper on the film “Gattaca” I wrote last year for my anthropology class, I wrote it as a 21-year-old naturally born girl from the 21th century, living in the 23rd century where most people were born through genetic selection. Thanks to Mr. Wilkins’ indoctrination, I kept clear reminders in my mind: my audience was scientists working on perfect genes and the purpose of my writing was to analyze how technology shaped people to be unthinkably dependent on genes to decide the meanings of life in a future world. After entering university, I have a stronger sense that Mr. Wilkins was the influential person remarkable to my literacy development. It’s he that changed me from writing purely to finish assignments, to something that’s real and meaningful. 

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Final Revised Discourse Community Project

The Genres of Nutrition Professionals

YIWEN BAO

Produced Winter 2018 UWP1

Introduction

Food choices, diet habits and nutrition intakes are influential to human health. Nutrition professionals are the group of people that highly related to this. Learnt about the important roles they played in society and human development, I choose to write this paper on the nutrition professionals, and focus mainly on the genres of it.

“A discourse community is a group of people who share ways to claim, organize, communicate, and evaluate meanings” (Schmidt and Kopple 1). Nutrition professionals are a group of people who share goals of developing knowledge on nutritional biology and enhancing public health through nutritious diets and healthy food choices. They have specialized vocabularies such as calories, vitamins, and weight management. Being inquiring and knowledgeable in nutrition fields with required degrees of education are expectations for members. For this paper, the most important definition of nutrition professionals discourse community is the genre because “Genres represent their communities, and therefore effect and make consequential the communities’ interests” (Bawarshi, Devitt, and Reiff 543).

One way nutrition professionals strive to achieve goals is through various effective genres unique to the community. Due to its significance and concerns to me as a clinical nutrition major, my research will concentrate on the genre part of nutrition professionals discourse community.

In this paper, I’m going to define genres of my discourse community, to focus on how nutritionists use genres to communicate among themselves and with the non-members, how genres differ for members from non-members, and how the differences define the inclusiveness and exclusiveness of the discourse community.

Methods

In general, I did two researches: a survey as primary research on the non-members—the public and patients, and secondary research on members—nutrition professionals.

I sent google forms to ten people at different aged groups, of both genders, of different education backgrounds, and from the US, China, and Mexico. The three who had experience in medical recovery assisted by nutritionists represented patients, and all ten gave me information on the public. Ten questions were asked on how they made food choices; what genres they used to achieve health through foods; and how they used genres to communicate with the nutritionists.

The results of this survey facilitate my exploration of genres in nutrition professionals discourse community in two ways: firstly, they demonstrated what and how information should be included in genres nutrition professionals use to either communicate among themselves or to the public; secondly, they provided chances to compare some genres used by both members and non-members.

My secondary research was on three books and many peer-reviewed journal articles. They gave me examples of genres used by nutrition professionals to analyze, information on how genres were shaped by non-members and how members’ use of genres shapes their communications with the non-members.

Combining results of two researches, I drawn conclusions on how members are “gatekeepers” of the discourse community.

Results and Discussion

From two research methods, I found that genres used by nutrition professionals are research papers, journals and credible websites; visual media such as food labels, menus, quantitative recipes and self-monitoring food records; social media such as Facebook and blog posts. I will mainly talk about three of them: research papers, food labels, menus and recipes.

Research papers

Through secondary research, I found that nutritionists need to update their knowledge on food and nutrition frequently and constantly, to educate the public with latest and most reliable information on behavior modification and diet changes.

For instance, the belief used to be that “despite all the calcium, dairy can cause osteoporosis because it is high in protein.” (Gunnars). But in June 8, 2017, that theory was rejected because “studies consistently show that eating more protein leads to improved bone health.” (Gunnars) This new knowledge is influential to the proportion dairy should be put in recipes, menus and other genres nutritionists used to enhance the public’s health.

To learn new knowledge, nutritionists write and read many research papers. When nutritionists write own papers, they conducted primary researches using research models such as translational research and epidemiologic research. They translate knowledge in nutritional science to practical application in achieving their goals of enhancing human health in a translational research, and trace back the sources of human diseases related to food consumptions in an epidemiological research. What they do to gather data are conducting formative research on focus groups, interviews, telephone surveys, and etc.

All nutritionists such as ones in the Office of Special Research Skills and Support in FDA continue studying on new topics and finding answers to questions in nutrition and food. Then they share research results with other professionals, discuss together, and come to an agreement on what information to update for the non-members.

The vocabularies in research papers are highly professional and scientific. Many terms like “amyotrophic lateral sclerosis”, “pneumonia” and “triglycerides” required education in nutrition biology to understand. Language of research papers is academic, authoritative and difficult for unprofessional audiences to enjoy and interpret.

Food Labels

Another genre nutritionists use is food labels. Through the use of food labels, they communicate within the discourse community to come to agreements then communicate the agreed information to non-members.

Information on food labels should all be agreed strictly by nutritionists in the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition in FDA. Nutritionists in the Office of Food Labeling particularly work on these. They do plenty of researches on nutritional biology and discuss a lot to make decisions on accurate knowledge. Then FDA is in charge of publishing the credible information on food labels.

In the process of nutritionists updating knowledge about the nutrient elements in food labels, this genre shapes members’ communications to the non-members. “FDA modernizes Nutrition Facts label for packaged foods” (2016), some changes are increasing the type size for “Calories,” “servings per container,” to highlight the most important information agreed by nutritionists, and removing “Calories from Fat” “because research shows the type of fat is more important than the amount.” (2016) Other changes are said to be published soon to enhance human health.

Vocabularies nutritionists used in coming to agreements on information are as academic and specialized as those in research papers. However, there’s a narrowed word bank where vocabularies are specific for information on food labels, so words like “fiber” and “saturated fat” are the focus.

Menus and Recipes

Nutritionists also use menus and recipes to communicate with the non-members. They write menus to tell patients what to eat for recovery or rebuilt of health, and publish recipes to inform the public how to cook healthy dishes. These two genres are formed on nutritionists’ strudies too. One example is the “9 Healthy Dinner Ideas from A Registered Dietitian That Take 20 Minutes or Less to Make”, where the dietitian Jessica Jones publish her research results. Compared to food labels, the primary researches done here are more on humans rather than in laboratories.

Some recipes use blogs like Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and Instagram accounts like “Epicurious” to post recipes plus nutrition advice. So social media is also used. There’re many other websites served as archives for recipes, produced by nutritionists. The language of the recipes is emphatic, provisional and informative.

Specifically analyzing the menus, I found they are customized by primary research. Two Mexicans and one Chinese answered “yes” for question eight on my survey. They were once patients suffered from therapies or obesity and they all received menus from nutritionists.

The variations in menus shaped nutritionists’ communications with patients: nutritionists gave mechanical diet for the old Chinese lady with poor fitted dentures, Calorie-restricted diet for the Mexican suffered from obesity, and low-cholesterol diet for the Mexican just finished cardiac surgery. In such a way, different vocabularies are used on target. Besides, one difference from genres used in menus and recipes to those in research papers and food labels is the informality, characterized by words simpler and easier to be understood because menus and recipes are published to non-members.

Non-members Use Food Labels, Recipes, Menus

In order to explore the inclusiveness and exclusiveness of my discourse community, and how the above genres shape nutritionists’ communications with the outside, it’s important to see how non-members use the above four genres.

From my survey all ten people were exposed to food labels, 40% of them had used recipes, 30% had received menus from nutritionists, and 0% had read any research papers published by nutritionists.

When using these genres, they only checked calories on food labels, found what to eat from menus, and took out recipes before cooking. They don’t care how calories on food labels are calculated and why certain foods are on the regular menus for morning not modified menus for evening.

Differences between Two Groups of Communications

From above analysis, I can clearly see differences between genres used by nutrition professionals to communicate with members and those with non-members. Languages in food labels, menus and recipes used to communicate with the outside are succinct and straightforward, but informative and well-organized. The key information is marked to be stand out from the whole text. They are phrased by nutritionists to be understandable, problem-oriented, and comprehensive to different cultures and education backgrounds. (Clifford and Laura 24-26). However, research papers and academic sources used to agree on knowledge for food labels, menus and recipes are full of scientific words and formal languages. For instance, nutritionists use “imbalance” on genres published to the non-members instead of “dysbiosis” in research papers specific for nutrition professionals’ use.

Members and non-members of my discourse community also have different interpretations of the same information in the same genre. Here’re three examples.

As I just mentioned the word “imbalance”, nutritionists can understand the meaning of “balance” differently from the public. “Being in a nutritional balance means that you consume just the right amount of calories, macronutrients and micronutrients from your diet” (Coffman), while the surveyed people understood “balance” as consuming some from all categories of foods, vegetables, meat, drinks and etc. The public has little idea on how much meat contributes how many proteins to what percent of the requirement.

FDA and nutritionists have similar goal of improving human health, but they have different concerns and perspectives. FDA has the power to make the final decision on changes in food labels, but nutritionists can only present best knowledge on what information they think should be there. Nutritionists use scientific communications to generate nutritional facts, but FDA takes the responsibility to phrase communications in ways that can effectively reduce social health costs.

The public has confusion on “daily values” in food labels. They would intuitively think values add up to 100%. However, FDA says that “the %DV is the percentage of the Daily Value for each nutrient in one serving of the food.” Therefore, more communications to the public about the health standards of daily values are necessary to enhance nutritionists’ use of genres.

In one word, the differences discussed above demonstrate how the expectations of members are defined, and how members’ and non-members’ uses of genres shape their communications to the other group.

Final conclusions

Nutrition professionals is a discourse community where members use genres to counsel, educate patients and the public to achieve goal of improving their health. What they do is to motivate the non-members to change diet habits and modify behaviors.

After analyzing genres members used: research papers, food labels, menus and recipes, and contrasting how two groups use these four genres, I conclude the inclusiveness and exclusiveness of the nutrition professionals discourse community.

Members of nutrition professionals should understand specialized vocabularies in nutrition; make progress by reading and writing research papers; master nutrition biology behind information on genres; make decisions on what correct information to give to the non-members; and have communication skills to persuade public to change diet habits and modify behaviors.

The excluded populations of this discourse community are: people who care about or understand only parts of the information in genres; who have low exposure to nutrition-related texts; who lack skills to enhance public health; and lack nutrition biology knowledge plus specialized research methods.

Take “food labels” as an example: members should know the deep concepts behind such as basic calories, saturated fat and sodium intake standards. While non-members only learn what would be eaten but how sodium could contribute to changes in body functions aren’t their concerns.

Without those genres, nutrition professional community would not function well to enhance public health through foods. Also, without satisfying those expectations of community members, random persons should be excluded from the nutrition professionals discourse community.

Work Cited:

Association., American Hospital. Diet and Menu Guide for Hospitals. Chicago, 1969.

Bawarshi, Anis, Amy J. Devitt, and Mary Jo Reiff. “Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities.” College English 65 (2003): 541-58. EBSCOhost. Web. 2 Nov. 2011.

Clifford, Dawn, and Laura Curtis. Motivational Interviewing in Nutrition and Fitness. New York: The Guilford Press, 2016.

Draper, A, and J A Swift. “Qualitative Research in Nutrition and Dietetics: Data Collection Issues.” Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics: the Official Journal of the British Dietetic Association, vol. 24, no. 1, 2011, p. 3., doi:10.1111/j.1365-277X.2010.01117.x.

Folchetti, L.G., et al. “Nutritionists' Health Study Cohort: a Web-Based Approach of Life Events, Habits and Health Outcomes.” Vol. 6, no. 8, 2016, p. e012081., doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2016-012081.

Gunnars, Kris. “Calcium and Osteoporosis - Is Dairy Really Good For Your Bones?” Healthline. n.p., 8 June 2017. Web. 27 Feb. 2018.

Holli, Betsy B, and Judith A Beto. Nutrition Counseling and Education Skills for Dietetics Professionals. Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2014.

Kresser, Chris. “The Acid - Alkaline Myth: Part 1.” Chriskresser. n.p., 21 June 2013. Web. 27 Feb. 2018.

Leslie O. Strolla, Kim M. Gans, Patricia M. Risica. “Using Qualitative and Quantitative Formative Research to Develop Tailored Nutrition Intervention Materials for a Diverse Low-Income Audience.” Health Education Research, vol. 21, no. 4, 1 Aug. 2006, pp. 465–476., doi.org/10.1093/her/cyh072.

Twynstra, J., and P. Dworatzek. “Use of an Experiential Learning Assignment to Prepare Future Health Professionals to Utilize Social Media for Nutrition Communications.” Canadian Journal of Dietetic Practice and Research, vol. 77, no. 1, 2016, pp. 30–34., doi:10.3148/cjdpr-2015-032.

Schmidt, Gary D., and Kopple W. J. Vande. Communities of Discourse: The Rhetoric of Disciplines. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993. Print.

“Survey of Nutrition Professionals Discourse Community.” Google form survey. 24 Feb. 2018.

Tomas, Philipson. “Government perspective: food labeling.” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Volume 82, Issue 1, 1 July 2005, Pages 262S–264S. Web. 13 March 2018.｀                                                                                                    

Appendix:

·  Age & Gender

·  Culture background

·  Degree of Education received

1. How do you usually make food choices? (Based on tastes? Functions? Habits?)

2. Do you care about nutritious aspects and health outcomes of your diets and food choices? If so, why do you care? (in weight management? Educated? Life style?)

3. How often do you read articles, journals, blog posts and other online texts about food and nutrition?

4. Do you see those resources in question 3 helpful, reliable and knowledgeable?

5. Do you read food labels on food items you bought?

6. If so, what parts do you care about most? How useful do you think information on it is? How food labels contribute to your foodd choices?

7. If no, what are some reasons not to read food labels?

8. Have you ever been treated by nutritionists and dieticians? If so, were you exposed to any medical forms, notes charts or self-monitoring food records that told you to keep appropriate diets in recovery?

9. What information did you look at in those written texts? How much information did you understand and use? What information did you skip or had difficulties interpreting?

10. How do you think those texts effective in helping you recover and keep healthy for your future life?

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Cover Memo

      My literacy narrative talks about an influential English teacher named Mr. Wilkins who changed me from writing for assignments to writing for something real. His effects were in emphasizing significance of audiences and purposes, language usage and variety of text types.

      One strength of my draft is the completeness of my story. I include all whom the person is, what the significance of him is, and how my experience with him shaped my writing. And I suggest the structure be to clear. Also, the conclusion part tied back to the questions in the introduction by describing how them are kept in my mind for a long time. And I hope those real examples could support my points.

      A weakness could be the fluency of the narrative. I was weak at phrasing precisely in exact words and sentences. Grammars aren’t perfect as well. And the balance of paragraphs in the structure aspect of my blog could be improved. The story could also be not interesting enough to read for audiences who have less close relationship with me.

      When my teacher was giving me feedbacks, I would like to hear from how my word choice could be improved to concise my phrasing and make my story sound more interesting. And I want to know if the two paragraphs on language use and text types are too formal. Are different paragraphs balanced well? What about the effectiveness of questions and “how crazy and strange this teacher was” in introduction paragraph? In addition, I’m curious about whether you could get how my final paragraph reflects on my current writing and ties back to the introduction. Also, do you feel my paragraphs all focused on the main topic? If not, I would ask for suggestions on how to develop connections between them.

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Writing for Something Real-Second Draft

      “Why should anyone care about what you write?” “Why should your essay even exist?” ...Before Mr. Wilkins, my English language teacher in Grade 11 and 12, taught me English writing in completely unique way, I never considered about English writing from these perspectives. When he asked me those sharp and incisive questions during the first week of his class, I could understand none of them but shocked by how “crazy” and strange this teacher was.

      Either because of English as my second language or due to my Chinglish writing styles and habits, I had been writing in English only to finish assignments for ten school years. What I was doing when writing in English was actually translating stories from Chinese, saying out my ideas in English, and trying to fill in certain framed formats with thoughts and narratives. The beauty of language, the depth of thesis, the innovation of structure, and the purpose of my writing are aspects I worked on a lot more in Chinese writing, while English writing was never a literary creation to me. Luckily, such method of writing continued bringing me good grades out of few efforts. However, at the point Mr. Wilkins asked me questions like “Who are your audiences?” “What do you truly want to say in this essay, except those simple personal ideas?”, I realized my old lazy method of writing just to finish assignments would no longer succeed anymore.

      He assigned me to read a book named ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird”. And those questions I mentioned above were some of his comments on my third draft of a letter to myself based on this book. When I wrote first three drafts, I wrote a letter to myself—Yiwen Bao, just as writing a diary on summary and reflections of my reading experience. This was the “successful” way I wrote letter to myself for the past ten years. But this time, he scored me only 3 out of 7! I was definitely surprised and confused but still confident on my old “successful” writing conventions, thus only corrected my grammar errors and added on more interesting thoughts on characters in the book.

      Then he called me to talk face-to-face. I could clearly see disappointment and discontent on his young face as soon as we made eye-contact. Those questions were flying out of his mouth, leaving a long silence and an awkward me. I now learned how serious he was about writing.

      At that night I started thinking about ways other than self-talk, to answer the question on what the true aim of my letter could be. He didn’t leave me lost but helped me answer those questions by guiding me to take on a character’s voice and write a letter as this character to herself. We analyzed different characters and their significant plots together, getting a better understanding of the book. While in the past, writing a single piece would only push me to pick up the book once.

      My fourth draft was a completely different one, not in sense of language use, but “I” was the 8-year-old Scout in the book writing a letter to 6-year-old myself, to a real audience not teacher or grader. This was the first time I wrote a text type like a diary that I had clear specific purpose of reflecting on my growth in two years and changes of understandings on social justice. After only one written assignment, Mr. Wilkins had already opened a new world of writing for me, a world where writing is a meaningful work that could both practice language skills and enhance understanding of related readings.

      He continued emphasizing the significance of writing for a purpose by asking me to always write a rationale. He taught me that everything I wrote had to have specific audiences and he would ask me to write as many drafts as I made my writing a real meaningful one. In rationales, I reflected on my “purpose”, understood the identity of audiences, and thought about how chosen text type, register and language influenced my communication with audiences.  

      To keep me improving on writing for something real, Mr. Wilkins guided me to cared more about my language. In his class, I spent weeks exploring topics on language like “how does the usage of argumentative language change between audio-visual medium and electronic medium when discussing global issues” and “How does repetition of words affect audiences’ comprehension of the importance of information in a writing”. I got access to new texts such as Robert Frost’s poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. By analyzing them by myself instead of searching for “argumentative language” and “repetition” straightly online, I learned those more in depth and could apply them better in my writing. Also, I was more adept at taking on diverse voices of people: a lecturer, an imaginary future character extended from one in a book; a football fan, etc. Gradually, I regarded my English writing assignments more and more as serious literacy works.

      Various text types Mr. Wilkins introduced to me were another useful tool to write true writings. Besides letter and diary, writing eulogy, argumentative essay and speech enriched my experience of communicating with different audiences, in formal, argumentative, ironic or collaborative registers. And writing in unfamiliar text types pushed me to understand topics and analyzing readings from various perspectives. He even taught me to write pamphlets which I previously thought would never be taught in an English writing class. However, just as getting his idea of practicing speaking like an advertisement designer, I eventually could understand functions of all his writing assignments.

      After two years, my view of English writing changed dramatically. English writing is now about true literacy to me, a serious work of not just writing stories and completing sentences, but also lots of analysis, knowledge, skills and talents required for a fabulous work. In last semester of high school, Mr. Wilkins marked 7 out of 7 in one of my diary on “greater poverty than nothing to eat” and praised my construction of paragraphs, recognition of audiences, use of language such as putting quotation marks on “food” and “donate”, because the way I wrote them were all specific to the prompt, purpose and audiences.

      Since that first letter to myself, I had always been reflecting on whom my audiences were, what I truly wanted to say, how my writing could be useful or meaningful to my audiences and what the real purpose was when writing. In a paper on film Gattaca I wrote last year for anthropology class, I voiced as a 21-year-old naturally born girl from 21th century living in 23rd century where most people were born through genetic selection. I kept clear reminders in my mind: my audiences were scientists working on perfect genes and my purpose of writing was to analyze how technology shaped people to be unthinkably dependent on genes to decide meanings of life in a future world. After entering university, I have a stronger sense that Mr. Wilkins was the influential person remarkable to my literacy development. It’s he that changed me from writing for assignments and teachers to write for something real.

[ywbao17-blog]

Cover Memo-First Draft

One strength of my draft is the completeness that the whole story was told. I include all whom the person is, what the significance of him is, and how my experience with him shaped my writing. And I suggest the structure to be clear. Also, the conclusion part tied back to the questions in the introduction by describing how them are kept in my mind for a long time. And I hope those real examples could support my points well.

A weakness could be the fluency of the narrative. I was weak at phrasing precisely in exact words and sentences. Some repetition might occur that I couldn’t recognize by myself. Word choices and grammar are still imperfect. And how the big stories and other small ones are organized and distributed might also need improvement. Since I wrote much for the first point, there might seem to be a rush in finishing the next two. Probably the ideas weren’t expressed clearly and the whole narrative could lose a good balance.

For my peers, I want to ask if they can understand my narrative and whether it’s too boring to read. If boring, how can I make it more interesting? And I would ask them to tell whether the way I distributed my three main points looks good or not. Are there too much information or I could expand more on any of them? I gave specific examples in my narrative, and I want to get feedback on whether they helped or hindered my peers’ understanding. Suggestions for alternative word choices could all be useful feedbacks. And other comments on sentence structures, clarity of ideas, my voice and reading experience as audiences are all welcomed and grateful.

[ywbao17-blog]

Writing for Something Real-Draft

           “Who are your audiences?” “What do you truly want to say in this essay, except those simple personal ideas?” “Why should anyone care about what you write?” “Why should your essay even exist?” ...Before Mr. Wilkins, my English language teacher in Grade 11 and 12, taught me English writing in completely unique way, I never considered about English writing from these perspectives. When he asked me those sharp and incisive questions during the first week of his class, I could understand none of them but shocked by how “crazy” and strange this teacher was.

           Either because of English as my second language or due to my “Chinese-English” stereotyped writing styles and habits, I had been writing in English only to finish assignments for ten school years. When I wrote in English, I was actually translating stories from Chinese, saying out my ideas in English, and trying to fill in certain frames formats with thoughts and narratives. The beauty of language, the depth of thesis, the innovation of structure, and the purpose of my writing are aspects I worked on a lot more in Chinese writing. English writing was never a literary creation to me. Luckily, such method of writing continued bringing me good grades out of few efforts. But when Mr. Wilkins started teaching me English writing, my old lazy method no longer worked.

           He assigned me to read a book named ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird”. And questions in the beginning paragraph were some of his comments on my third draft of a letter to myself based on this book. When I wrote first three drafts, I wrote a letter to myself—Yiwen Bao, just as writing a dairy on summary and reflections of my reading experience. He gave me a score of 3 out of 7. I was confused but still confident on my old “successful” writing conventions, only revised my grammar errors and added on more interesting thoughts on characters in the book. Then he called me to talk face-to-face. I could clearly see disappointment and discontent on his young face. Those questions were flying out of his mouth, leaving a long silence and an awkward me. I learned how serious he was about writing and at that night I started to thinking about ways other than self-talk, to answer the question on what the true aim of my letter could be. He didn’t leave me lost but helped me answering those questions by guiding me to take on a character’s voice and write a letter as this character to herself. We analyzed different characters and their significant plots together, getting a better understanding of the book. My fourth draft was a completely different one, not in sense of language use, but “I” was the 8-year-old Scout in the book writing a letter to 6-year-old myself, to a real audience not teacher or grader. This was the first time I wrote a text type like a dairy that I had clear specific purpose of reflecting on my growth in two years and changes of understandings on social justice. Mr. Wilkins opened a new world of writing for me, a world where writing is a meaningful work that could not only practice my language skills but also enhance my understanding of related readings.

           Mr. Wilkins continued emphasizing the significance of writing for a purpose by asking me to write a rationale for each writing. He taught me that everything I wrote had to have specific audiences and he would ask me to write as many drafts as I made my writing a real meaningful one. In rationales, I reflected on my “purpose”, understood the identity of audiences, thought about how chosen text type facilitated my expression of ideas and how register and language influenced my communication with audiences.  

           Not only to write for a purpose, Mr. Wilkins also guided me to cared more about my language. In his class, I spent weeks exploring topics on language like “how does the usage of argumentative language change between audio-visual medium and electronic medium when discussing global issues” and “How does repetition of words affect audiences’ comprehension of the importance of information in a writing”. I got access to new texts such as Robert Frost’s poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. By analyzing them by myself instead of searching for “argumentative language” and “repetition” straightly online, I learned those more in depth and could apply them better in my writing. Also, I was more adept at taking on diverse voices of people: a lecturer, an imaginary future character extended from one in a book; a football fan, etc. Gradually, I regarded my English writing assignments more and more as serious literacy works.

           Various text types Mr. Wilkins introduced to me were another useful tool to write true writings. Besides letter and dairy, writing eulogy, argumentative essay and speech enriched my experience of communicating with different audiences, in formal, argumentative, ironic or collaborative registers. And writing in unfamiliar text types pushed me to understand topics and analyzing readings from various perspectives. He even taught me to write pamphlets which I thought would never be taught in an English writing class before. However, just as getting his idea of practicing speaking like an advertisement designer, I eventually understood functions of all his writing assignments.

           After two years, my view of English writing changed dramatically. English writing is now about true literacy to me, a serious work of not just writing stories and completing sentences, but also lots of analysis, knowledge, skills and talents required for a fabulous work. In last semester of high school, Mr. Wilkins marked 7 out of 7 in one of my dairy on “greater poverty than nothing to eat” and appraised my construction of paragraphs, recognition of audiences, use of language such as putting quotation marks on “food” and “donate” because they were all specific to the prompt, purpose and audiences. Since that first letter to myself, I has always reflected on whom my audiences were, what I truly wanted to say, how my writing could be useful or meaningful to my audiences and what the real purpose is when I’m writing. In a paper on film Gattaca I wrote last year for anthropology class, I voiced as a 21-year-old naturally born girl from now living in 23rd century where most people were born through genetic selection. I kept clear reminders in my mind: my audiences were scientists working on perfect genes and my purpose of writing was to analyze how technology shaped people to be unthinkably dependent on genes to decide meanings of life in a future world. After entering university, I have a stronger sense that Mr. Wilkins was the influential person remarkable to my literacy development. It’s he that changed me from writing for assignments and teachers to write for something real.