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Name: Anthony Navarro-Sanchez

Course: Writing 2

Instructor: Maddie Roepe

Date: 12/09/2023

My Journey from Doubt to Discovery in Writing

Before starting Writing 2, I felt like my writing skills were just okay. They weren’t the

best since writing was never my strong suit, but they were decent enough to meet teacher

requirements. I’ve always been more of a math and science guy since I’d always do better in

those courses and overall just found it easier to get the hang of them. Writing, on the other hand,

felt like it had harder rules to follow, and I struggled with being creative. However, after taking

this course, little did I know that was not the case.

Taking this course completely shifted my perspective on writing. Within the first few

weeks, I remember learning a certain technique that stuck with me throughout the quarter,

completely changing the way I approached writing. This technique came from a class reading

titled, “Teaching Two Kinds of Thinking by Teaching Writing” by Peter Elbow. In this piece,

Elbow writes about how to approach writing if you ever feel stuck and don’t know where to

begin. He talks about the idea of having two types of thinking models while you write:

First-order thinking, which is intuitive and creative, allows you to write quickly without

worrying about small details like grammar, and second-order thinking, the stage where you

revise, reflect, and overall think more critically about what you wrote. He argues that the whole

point of first-order thinking is to just get a flow of ideas as you write on your paper, and the more

you write, the more ideas start to flow, simplifying the writing process. Second-order thinking,

on the other hand, is when you take time to reflect on what you wrote. During this process, you
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think more ‘critically’ and take time to delete or fix sentences according to the structure of your

paper (Elbow 1986). This technique allowed me to write more creatively and overcome the

challenges I used to face when I first started writing any kind of paper.

Using this technique for all of my submissions worked wonders. I felt like this was just

the thing that I needed to fill the gap that hindered my creativity. However, this was just the

beginning of my learning journey throughout this course.

The first main project, which was due in the fourth week, was about translating a research

article into a genre of my liking. Initially, I thought to myself: This seems easy enough (even

though I had never done anything like it before), but little did I know the number of steps that

were involved in doing a translation like this. Finding a research article was the easy part. I

searched around Google Scholar until I eventually found an article about deforestation and how

it was impacting mammals. The first difficulty I encountered while doing this translation was

finding a genre to translate this article to. After some minutes, I decided to go with a short story

as my genre and eventually find a way to somehow explain the research findings from the article

into a short story. But then I thought to myself: How do I even begin? Where do I even start?

How in the world am I going to implement these research findings into a story? At this point, I

was even thinking about switching my chosen genre to another. That was until I recalled another

class reading that had been assigned to me in the past, “Make your “move”: Writing in genres.”

by Brad Jacobson and his colleagues. These writers talked about where to begin when you decide

to write in a genre of your choosing. They gave great tips on how to start and suggested that you

should first start by looking at many different examples of that specific genre that you chose to

write in, (emphasis on ‘many’ since every writer can have different meanings or perceptions of

the genre they are writing in) (Jacobson et al. 2021) and that is exactly what I did. I began to look
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up examples of short stories and tried to figure out the structure of their writing. The next tip that

these writers gave was making a checklist, where you write on one side the features that these

genres had in common. For my checklist, I wrote, “Has characters, dialogue, narration, involves

a journey, and includes an obstacle that the main character encounters somewhere along the

way.” The writers then suggested taking a sample of examples from this genre and checking the

boxes of the checklist, that I had previously made, to see which ones had these features and

which ones didn’t. With this newly made checklist, I decided that I now knew what to do, and

the next step was to start.

However, I then struggled when starting this short story. I sat there and thought to myself,

how would I implement characters and present these research findings from the article into the

story in a way that fits together? I began to give up and think back to when I had originally

chosen a short story as my genre. Maybe a short story wasn’t the best option for doing this type

of translation, I thought to myself. But after a few days of sitting on this thought, I remember

suddenly coming up with the best idea: Making characters in the story as if they were the

researchers themselves who performed the studies from the article and made a discovery. And so

there I had it; I began to write. I wrote this short story to the best of my ability, or so I thought (I

left out some important key features of short stories, which I would later find out was a big

mistake. I only did this since I had trouble implementing them into my short story). Nonetheless,

in the end, I had a somewhat polished story with a character who was a researcher and performed

these studies in the story, which led to the great findings of the actual research article.

Now it was time for the second big project of the Writing 2 course: a translation of a

scholarly conversation. The idea of this project was to take a conversation of articles that all

discussed something about writing studies and summarize it into a genre of your choosing.
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Luckily for me, I had some experience with research articles in the past, and this was the reason I

found this project a bit more manageable. Other courses I’ve taken in the past had me look at

many research articles about biology, and so I was forced to become familiar with them. So

coming into this assignment with previous knowledge of how to search up and look at research

articles was very familiar to me. For this project, I followed the same steps I took while doing

my first writing project. I first had to find a scholarly conversation on a topic about writing, so I

began to think back to my past experiences with writing and I tried to find something that could

relate to that. One thought that came to mind was how writing was always difficult for me and

maybe that had to do with me not reading that much when I was little and instead spending my

time on the internet. So the research question that I came up with was: How does social media

affect writing skills? I then began to search for articles and came across 5 that looked at this

research question. The next step was finding a good genre that I could translate this conversation

into. I decided to go with a Reddit thread, where I would create online users and have them be

the researchers from the actual studies. These researchers would then argue online with each

other about which social media platform was the best for improving people’s writing skills (I did

this since all researchers argued for about the same point: that social media can indeed better

someone’s writing skills) I then followed Jacobson’s idea of creating checklists and looking at

similar examples within my genre. I began to look at Reddit threads and look for the features that

they all had in common and also how they were structured (I excluded the threads with explicit

language and instead focused on threads that I deemed to be reasonable with good arguments).

After this part, I got stuck on how to even start this imaginary thread, so I used Elbow’s idea,

again, about performing First-order thinking and I let my thoughts guide my writing. After trial
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and error, and two drafts, I had a pretty solid thread and it looked like the idea I was going for

and so I felt accomplished with what I wrote.

The biggest challenge of this course was yet to come, which was the revision process of

these two big projects. From the feedback I’d received, and my own reflection after initially

writing these two projects, I realized that I made many mistakes while writing them. The project

that I messed up on the most was the first one. Thinking back to when I turned it in, I was happy

with how it turned out, but now after being exposed to feedback, and more writing experience, I

realize that it could’ve been a whole lot better. Revising this piece and making it look the way I

wanted it to look now, was the most time-consuming assignment I’d done for this course. I went

back to looking at short story examples, wrote some dialogue, came up with another character,

and even rewrote a lot of the story. However, I managed to incorporate all of these things and I

would say that as of right now (December 9, 2023) I am content with how it turned out.

While revising my second big project, the biggest problem I saw with it was the

organization. Things just felt out of place and there were parts that I felt like I could’ve added

more to make it more immersive. So I decided to craft up a fake Reddit thread and create replies

from the researchers to make it seem more real. I also rewrote the cover letter for that assignment

to better introduce my piece to the reader. After creating the fake Reddit thread and making the

cover letter more relatable to the reader, I would say I did a good job of revising this project.

Overall, at this point in the course, I didn’t even realize how much my way of writing had

changed since I was so busy focusing on editing and rewriting drafts. It was only until I began

writing this reflection that I realized how all of the efforts I put in and all of the strategies that

I’ve learned have really helped me become a better writer. Strategies such as audience

awareness, genre conventions, and rhetorical awareness have all been a part of the learning
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process of this course. Going forward, I certainly feel more comfortable and capable of writing

papers, especially from a perspective way different from when I first started this course.

Works Cited

Elbow, Peter. “Teaching Two Kinds of Thinking by Teaching Writing.” Embracing

Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching. New york: Oxford U Press. 1986. pp. 55-63.

Jacobson, Brad., et al. "Make your “move”: Writing in genres." Writing Spaces: Readings

on Writing, Volume 4 (2021). pp. 217-238