Dear UWP 1 Readers,

At the beginning of the quarter, I came to this class with the confident believing that previous UWP classes prepared me well. From punctuation to organizing, I thought that I understood the rules and knew how to organize a paper in a logic order, I would be able to write any paper without any struggles. However, through out the quarter, my belief was wrong. I realize that there are many components in writing, I did not know before, that can make a paper better besides the grammar rules and well-organized structure. Writing and reading in this course help students to develop skill in five practically areas. They are knowledge of convention, processes, research, metacognition, and rhetorical knowledge.

I would say that the readings in this class would be the only academic readings that I enjoyed so far. Some of the readings were really boring but they were really meaningful in term of the understanding of the paper projects. Each reading correspondence with each project. I got to explore different genres of readings, from personal statement to research.

First project was literacy narrative. In this project, I understand the real meaning of the first draft and learn the process of revising. At the beginning of the process, I was complete clueless because I did not know what to write about. Thinking as a whole, I had no idea how literacy can shape me as a writer today. Speech and Debate came to my head because I felt like that team had the most impact on me. According to my self-reflection, my first drat was a disaster. The paragraph was really chunky and not connected to together. The tone was super dark and made the story sound so tragic and heavy hearted. I was not satisfied with my first draft. However, I took Lamott’s advice that the first draft does not have to be perfect, it supposes to be shitty. After the peer reviewing day, I took advices from my peers. For revision, I had a little hard time because I already used to the “Student Revision Method” that Sommers explain in her article like fixing the grammar and changing the vocab so for this revision, I had to tried away from those methods. Instead of rewording, I started a new paragraph to replace the part that I did not like. During the revising process, I did not really count actually how many draft I wrote. I focused on the content of the paper more. For the order of the essay, I chose chronological order. For the order of the essay, I choose chronological order. I started with when I did not know English to how I can speak, read, and write fully in English. I believe with this order my audiences can easy to follow and understand how Speech and Debate team had shaped me into a person today. I thought for this project, delivering speech was more interesting than a paper for the readers to read. The word choice in this paper was for a speech. I tried to add a little sarcasm tone in the paper because I do not want the audiences be too bored with the story. It is used to create uplifting tone in some intense paragraphs so it builds up a positive thought in a negative idea. In the paper, I also created some questions in order for the audience to engage into the reading instead of just read about what my experience was.

Second project was Literacy Self Study/ College Literacy Resource Project. I learned the different styles of writing. Between Literacy Self Study and College Literacy Resource, I chose to do Literacy Self Study. This projects gave me an opportunity to look at my writing in daily life. I wrote about the different style of writing in emailing and texting. In my opinion, the main audience in this paper was mainly myself. Before I came up with an idea about observe my writing style in emailing and texting, I was being indecisive two topics. My first draft for Literacy Self Study, I combined the different types of writing and readings I used in my daily life. At the same time writing draft for the Literacy Self Study, I also wrote one for College Literacy Resource about the five paragraphs essay. I ended up choosing Literacy Self Study because at time I did not have enough experience with non-five paragraphs so I did not have much to say. I viewed writing between email and text as a way of communication at home and public places. Communication at home is more freely and comfortable, I guess. Language is more informal. Communication in public is more formal and uncomfortable. Whenever I speak in public, I have to pay attention to the words choices and the tone. Communication at home is like writing a text. Communication in public is like writing an email. Similar to the first project, my first draft for fully completed. I used the article, that I read in class which was “The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continue” by Canagarajah’s, to support my main arguments. However, when I received feedbacks from my professor, it seemed like I misunderstand the concept in the reading. I misunderstood between the concept of ME and WE and the formal and informal language. My revision process was very similar with the project one. There was a small different because my first draft was not well developed at all. It took more time and more work for me to revise since I had to finish the paper completely and then I started my revision process. For this project, I divided my paper into sections. Since I was doing the comparing of two writing, I did similarity section and different section. I believed that this order would be easier for readers to follow my paper. The tone was very neutral because this paper was a form of a research paper, for me at least. Overall, I had a great time with project. However, I felt like this project was the weakest paper out of all three project. I developed some learning outcomes but they were not fully developed.

Third project was Research Project: Discourse Community. This was a unique project compare from the other two project. In this project, I learned how to conduct a primary research and second research based on peer reviews. This was the hardest project for me out of three projects. It did not a paper I could talk about my own opinion. It was based on facts from research. My research was on a student-run clinic at UC Davis. The primary research was not hard because all I had to find the right questions to ask the interviewees. The secondary research was more complicated for me since I had to analyze and to find evidence to support my argument. I believed that the audience fort this research was everyone especially people interested in joining clinics. For the order of the paper, I started with secondary research so the readers could have somewhat of an idea what my paper was really about. Then I moved to the primary research. The third section of my paper was discussion. This part would show the readers the connection between my primary and secondary research. This was a trend for all of my three research. I always started out with really bad first draft. I was confused at the time because I did not really understand the real the real definition of “genre”. My peers were really generous by giving advise on where I should go with project. Before the conference day, I had a wrong idea about my secondary research. Instead of using my secondary research to support my primary research. I used it to give out facts for the readers instead of support my primary resources. However, I did fix this problem by finding more researches on student-run clinic and looking deeply on the research I already had. Since this project is another type of research paper, I chose to use natural tone. I tried to not to be bias about the clinic because I am a part of student clinic. Even though my research about student run clinic, I tried to make the connection between literacy impact in our community.

UWP 1 really changes me in my way of thinking and writing in a good way. The class introduced me to many genres of literacy. Before, I did not really know about the the different types of writing and reading since I only wrote academic papers and read novels from famous authors like Shakespeare. UWP 1 helps me in my future writing in someway but not as a whole. I am in a science major. I do not believe that I will see any of these types of writing again. However, the concepts of doing research paper and reading an academic paper will be very helpful in my future classes. UWP 1 really helps me improve to become a stronger writer. This class gave me opportunities to reflect my writing process in the past and think how to improve myself. Writing is not only about sit down and write, it is also a mental process. I have to think about who my audiences are, what tone should I use in order to get audience attention, and what I make a change in paper.

Thank you for taking your time to read this letter,

Sincerely,

Nguyen Le