Final Writing Reflection
Final Writing Reflection
Sophia Ramirez
Evans
Writing 2
13 December 2023
As I look back at the writer I was ten weeks ago, I can clearly see that my approach to the
writing process has improved in almost every aspect. From my research process, to how I write
my first drafts, to how I give and receive feedback. I would say that the biggest change with who
I am today is the level of comfort I have with the subject which comes from an understanding of
the vocabulary associated with writing. As far as I knew when I walked in on the very first day
of class, genre meant horror, comedy, or romance when talking about movies. Or, if discussing
music, then rap, country, or pop. That was about it. Although these are examples of genre, genre
encompasses nearly every package that writing can come in. The syllabus for Writing 2 I read
that first day was its own genre, distinct from the conversation I had with my classmates right
before. Who knew? Every body of work fell into its own genre with its own set of elements and
intention. Perceiving writing through this lens has really helped me approach my own work with
closer inspection. I know what to pay attention to when reading or writing in a certain genre and
Understanding what genre really is was the key to approaching genres in my own writing.
After discussing it in class, I can now identify it in the media I consume and interact with daily. I
recall a reading by Mike Bunn titled How to Read Like a Writer that we discussed in the first
week of class. He encourages writers to look deeper into what they read; Good writers don’t just
read to absorb the information being discussed, they read to also recognize the techniques used
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by the author to write the paper itself. Bunn says that we can assess the sentence structures and
tones, and possibly incorporate them into our own work. Reading this made me reflect on how I
already integrate this practice into my own reading, however, I always felt this was “cheating” in
a way. Sometimes I would make mental notes of sentence structures or good introductory hooks
to use as inspiration, but I was under the impression that I was supposed to think of my own
creative ideas instead. Now I’ve come to realize that it is a skill to be able to recognize effective
elements and use them to better your writing. I was heavily influenced by this idea when writing
my WP1. Prior to beginning, I was familiar with the basic structure and tone of gossip articles,
yet my drafts didn’t seem to capture their mood. I “studied” different gossip blogs to get a sense
of their layouts, phrases, and other elements to incorporate into my project and eventually picked
up on the kinds of wording authors use to make their work stand out within the genre. I have
become more observant of the writing I read which I think has helped me become a better writer.
Gathering sources for a paper can be the most time consuming aspect of the whole
writing process, but can also be quite entertaining. Especially for my WP2 which pulled
information from multiple sources, my research process took some time, along with trial and
error. Citation chaining was a big help to finding sources that had just enough overlap to flow
well in my discussion. After flipping through many different sources about the five-paragraph
essay, I was beginning to worry that all of their opinions were too similar and that my subject
was too specific. However, forward chaining drew the conversation further out to articles that
centered different ideas. At one point, I was even reading about medieval teaching techniques.
Despite having different main ideas, every article I found through citation chaining was linked
back to the five-paragraph essay one way or another. I limited my letter to five sources so I could
have space to explain each, but the conversation kept going. As I mentioned in my WP2
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reflection, citation chaining connected me to articles that I otherwise wouldn’t have found by just
using the key words “five-paragraph essay.” It’s a tool I will definitely be using for future
research assignments.
The most challenging part of writing has always been actually starting to write. Even
with extensive preparation, most of my attempts at completing a writing assignment have begun
by staring at a blank screen with hundreds of sentence ideas running through my head, yet none
good enough to be converted to text. I would want my end product to be good, but I could never
fathom my first drafts being bad. Or, as Anne Lamott calls them, shitty. In her article, Shitty First
Drafts, Lamott brings comfort to her readers by sharing that she too, after years of writing
professionally, dreads her first drafts. Her remedy for this fear is to embrace those “shitty” drafts.
They serve no other purpose but to start the process to the final. One quote from this article has
There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that
you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you're supposed to be
writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go -- but there was no way to
get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages (Lamott).
Her message is a good reminder that it’s always going to be more effective to continue writing
nonsense as I develop my thinking in my head, then narrowing down the ideas I actually want to
use. I can always come back to reword a sentence, but I wouldn’t want to lose my train of
thought and end up with one single “perfect” sentence. I can’t honestly say that this is an issue
that has been totally resolved, but I have been practicing this quarter with just getting something
down to begin with. As hard as it is to disconnect the second order from the first order thinking, I
have found that forcing myself to keep typing has helped me a lot in starting my projects.
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Once my projects do make it past those initial drafts and I deem them ready to be read by
others, it's time for peer reviews. Receiving feedback from my group members was beneficial
when revising my projects. They always ended up spotting areas I could expand on, clarify, or
even chop out. I noticed that both the comments I received and the comments I left on others
became more constructive as the quarter progressed, which I may have resulted from staying in
the same groups where we got to watch each other’s projects develop from start to finish. My
comments on others became more detailed and focused on content over spelling/grammar errors
like they have been in previous years. The article about peer editing definitely influenced this,
but I think the repetitive practice of reading and commenting was what helped me develop this
There is still a lot I can improve on to become a better writer, but I can tell there has been
some progress in my writing abilities over the past ten weeks. I feel much more confident in
approaching writing within different genres, and also in effectively using sources to get my
points across. These skills, along with others that we worked on in class, are ones that I would
like to continue working on. Writing 2 has required a lot of work and revision, but it has
Citations
Bunn, Mike. “How to Read Like a Writer.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1,
edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Parlor Press, 2010, 71-85
Lamott, Anne. "Shitty First Drafts.” Language Awareness: Readings for College Writers. Ed. by
Paul Eschholz, Alfred Rosa, and Virginia Clark. 9th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s,
2005: 93-96.