Writer's Journal #6 - Your Writing Practices OVERVIEW Throughout this course you will think and write about your relationship to your own writing practices; in fact, a sizable portion of your final portfolio will deal with this relationship. Being aware of one’s writing practices and shaping those practices help writers to become more efficient and effective as they produce various texts. DIRECTIONS In this Writer’s Journal, you will have the opportunity to explore your relationship to writing, your writing practices, and how this relationship might change in the course of this class. To help you in this reflection, please respond to the following questions: What role has writing played in your life? Describe your relationship to writing and language. How would you describe your previous writing experiences, overall? Whether good or bad, in what ways have your writing experiences prepared you for, or led you to, this course? What do you hope to do with writing in the future? How might you draw upon prior writing experiences in order to achieve those goals? What do you need to practice in order to be a more successful writer? What do you hope to gain from this writing course and its members? What are your expectations for yourself in this course? What are your expectations for the other members of the course? Be sure to be as detailed and thorough as possible, and use examples to help explain your response. Be sure to read over your response to be sure it says what you want it to say. I must admit that writing plays a vital role in my career development, as well as my daily life. We write every day, for example, emails and short messages. What is more, we need writing when we make applications to scholarship or other funding. We also should write reports to our boss or some other ones if we want to persuade them to do what we want them to do or think in a way which we hope them to have. Frankly speaking, I seldom practice my writing intentionally until I found it is really hard to raise my writing score in a standardized English test and thus, I think I should spend a lot of time on writing practice as well as the language learning.
Because of my lack of writing experience, or I would more like to take my former writing experience as unintentional writings, I could hardly to write some excellent articles, no matter the academic papers or a summary of a full report. In my opinion, my writing experiences until now just help myself have a basic and direct mind about whether this is a good article and why it is good in my own idea. In the future, I hope to write more reports to enlarge my impact in our industry, and also have impacts in real life. Furthermore, writing experience, in my opinion, could also help myself to build my own knowledge system and strengthen my understanding of my current knowledge. To become a more successful writer, especially in my field, I should enhance my skills in the following areas:
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OVERVIEW Encountering “rhetoric” and the “rhetorical situation” for the first time can be surprising for many students. These concepts seem familiar, but often this familiarity is vague or under-defined. However, by becoming more aware of the “rhetorical situation” and working with this awareness, we can better understand what we are doing in and with our writing. DIRECTIONS In this Writer’s Journal, you will have the opportunity to think about “rhetoric,” “the rhetorical situation,” and your understanding of these terms. To help you in this reflection, please respond to the following questions: Based on the readings and videos that you read/watched during week one, how would you describe “rhetoric”? What is “the rhetorical situation” and how do you see an awareness of this concept affecting your writing and behaviors? Describe a recent writing experience or activity where you used rhetoric to effectively convey a message to a specific audience? What was the purpose of the message? Who was the audience? How did you go about appealing to that audience? In what ways do you see your understanding of rhetoric and the rhetorical situation affecting your future writing projects? The WPA Outcomes lists “Rhetorical Knowledge” first in the list of outcomes areas. What does this say about the importance of rhetorical knowledge to writing? Given your experience of the course so far, how important does rhetorical knowledge seem to writing and the writing process? Be sure to be as detailed and thorough as possible, and use examples to help explain your response. Be sure to read over your response to be sure it says what you want it to say. Rhetoric is a strategy and the selection of different words to be used in writing, speaking and videos to persuade people to believe in the things or ideas you presented to them or to think in the way you show them.
The rhetorical situation may be some special techniques the writer use or in some circumstances where rhetorical methods usually occur. After knowing this, I will spend some time to learn rhetorical methods, try to identify them in my later reading, try to avoid using them apparently when I write in some conditions, and design the rhetoric stratedy appropriately. As my recent writing experience, I would like to share a recent report writing in Chinese because I have few opportunities to writing long essays and reports in English. The topic is about the analysis of Chinese Oversea Direct Investments (ODIs). The aim of this report is to analysis the status and the trend of Chinese ODIs and provide some suggestions in the future for the policy makers. The audiences of the report, in my opinion, includes the policy makers, the researchers in this field, the students and anyone who interests in this topic. The way I use to appeal these audiences is simple actually and is try to abtain numbers and use advanced visulization techniques to present the data in some new ways. In this way, I could provide some novel ideas based on my analysis and then use my professional knowledge and research methdologies in another field to give some suggestions from the view of a non econimists. My understanding of rhetoric and the rhetorical situation will influence my future works significantly. The more techniques and strategies I know, the more choices I could make to answer different demand in different situations. What is more, it could also affect my words' selection, the way I present my data which could support the argument in the writing and paragraph arrangements which could offer different reading experience for the readers. What does this say about the importance of rhetorical knowledge to writing? Given your experience of the course so far, how important does rhetorical knowledge seem to writing and the writing process? According to the Outcome 1 of WPA Outcomes, key rhetorical concepts need to be learned and researched if you want to use them in your writing intentionly. Furthermore, differnt genres have different ways to use these concepts. These rhetorical techniques and ideas will affect the writing in wide range of ways and generate various influence on the reading experience of the readers. As far as I know, rhetorical knowledge will affect the credibility of one article and the readers' interest to read it. If these knowlege is used properly, it will drive the readers read the writing from the beginning to the end. In the vedio of the course, we could know that the rhetoric appeals in three kind: ethos, logos and pathos. Every effect will affect the trustness of the ariticle. To make the ariticale believable, of course, there is no doubt that you should use approprivate ethos and logos. However, the use of pathos also matters. If it is used, for the one who believes you, he or she will believe in you stronger. On the contrary, for the ones who doubt you, they will definitely think you are playing emotinoal games with them. OVERVIEW Writers of all kinds often collaborate on writing projects. This can occur in person, or (as is increasingly the case) this collaboration can occur at a distance through digital technologies such as our online course. Sometimes this collaboration happens in the drafting of a piece of writing, but it can also occur in every stage of the writing process. . DIRECTIONS In this Writer’s Journal, you will consider what collaborative writing means to you. You will do this by addressing the following questions: How does the notion of writing collaboratively challenge your sense of what a writer is and does? Do you find collaborating on your writing exciting or intimidating? Why? What do you think you might learn or gain from collaborating with other writers? One of the bullets under the WPA Outcomes “Process” heading reads, “By the end of first -year composition, students should...Experience the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.” Why do you think the WPA Outcomes value the “collaborative and social aspects of the writing process?” What does this say about academic writing and collaboration? Be sure to be as detailed and thorough as possible, and use examples to help explain your response. Be sure to read over your response to be sure it says what you want it to say. Collaborative writing means a group of writers write a book or a report that one writer could not finished because of limitation of knowledge or time. To me, it means I could contribute a greater work that I could never achieve by myself and generate a greater impact. In my opinion, nowadays, writers are more likely to work alone, especially in some special kinds of writings, such as novels and fictions. Actually, most books I buy is written by one or two writers. Writing collaboratively means a group with more than three people writes together. The book has one topic, however different people contribute different part of the book. In this condition, a writer is only a contributor to one book not the writer of the whole one. However, there is a group of writer, there must be a leader, who not only contributes to the book's content, but also be in charge of the communication between writers and the organization of writer's communication. Right now, I found it seems more intimidating to me. Different people's contribution differs. Someone would like to contribute more time and works on one book or report, however some other one does not because of various reasons. The books credibility may be affected because of someone's unresponsibility. However, working with brilliant and responsible talents is a great thing. When writing together with these people, I have a chance to learn a lot from them, especially in the aspect of the professional areas. In addtion, we could also learn their rhetorical strategies which is so valued in our course before. Last but not least, working in a group could also offers us an opportunity to learn the leadership skills and communication techniques from the group leader in my opinion. The reason WPA Outcomes value the collabarative writing is because, in our real work, we could never work alone and we must collaborate with each other. Nowadays, as the exposion of knowledge, one people could hardly know so much details in different domains. Therefore, we should also work together. This is especially important in academic writing. Sometimes, people from different areas of research could inspire each other. This is also the value of inter-discipline. Take the research of climate change as an example, scientists from climate research, energy research, earth research, as well as computer science, should work together to get the research done. As the development of other traditional science, such as mathematics, biology, chemistry, computer science also plays a vital role in them. Therefore, some frontier research outcomes also presented by a collabration of two or more scientist from different background. OVERVIEW Reflection is an important part of learning how to write not only in the academic context but in any field that requires carefully considered communication. Reflection helps us to understand why we might have made decisions in our writing and what those decisions might reveal about our ways of thinking about, and initially approaching, writing. We can then use this insight to gain greater control over the writing that we produce. DIRECTIONS In this Writer’s Journal, you will have the opportunity to think about your own reflective processes and practices. To help you in this reflection, please respond to the following questions: - What do you think might be gained from reflecting on a completed piece of writing? What might reflection help you understand about your rhetorical decisions or your writing process? - In what ways do you think reflective writing differs from other types of writing? - What are some ways that you might reflect on the writing you do for this course? Where and how would you do this reflection? - Which of the WPA Outcomes does reflective writing seem to relate most directly to and how? Be sure to be as detailed and thorough as possible, and use examples to help explain your response. From reflecting on a completed piece of writing, we could review the process of our writing and have a rethinking on the question that whether we use a prorper structure and stragety to response our targeted readers' concerning and attract their interests in a proper way.
During the reflecting of our composition, we could read our works again and get the flow of ideas. Usually, at the first time, we write freely and write whatever in our brains on the paper. However, these ideas and examples are not well organised, although they may be related to the topic. Of course, we could hardly consider who the readers are, what they hope to see and their way of thinking when we are focusing on the content of our works. Therefore, some logical mistakes and unappropriate arrangements may be easily found through such kind of reflection. In my opinion, the aspects the reflection could help us on our rhetorical decisions include:
Frankly speaking, I have little ideas about the types of writing before because I am also an English learner right now, so I search on the Internet. The types include Expository writing, Descriptive Writing, Narrative writing, Persuasive writing. After knowing these types, I can say that the most important difference of reflective writing from others is that reflective writing is a new writing which is written by the author himself and based on one former writing of the same author. However, in Expository writing, the author intends to inform, explain, describe or define their subject to the readers. In Descriptive Writing, writers use a lot of great visual words to help the readers see the person, place or thing they are writing about. As Narrative writing, it is very common in novels, poetry and biographies. At last, Persuasive writing takes on the opinion of the writer or issue the writer is writing for. * For the writings I do for this course, in my opinion, I could do reflective thinking after a whole working package or a whole essay finished and write one refelctive writing when I think is neccessary or when it is required. I could put these writings on my website or on the discussion board to let my classmates and the tutor to read them. The Outcome 3 (Process) of WPA Outcomes is highly related to the reflective writing. It mentioned that "Reflect on the development of composing practices and how those practices influence their work" and "Use composing processes and tools as a means to discover and reconsider ideas". In reflective writing, we could refect the arrangement of the composition and this is actually a process or a tool that to be used to make our writing better. * SOURCE: http://www.teach-nology.com/themes/lang_arts/typesofwriting/ People tend to mean a wide variety of things when they refer to “The Learning Process.” Developmental psychologists, educational researchers, even sports coaches can have different definitions and conditions of the “learning process.” These varying definitions can enrich our understanding of learning in general and learning how to write in particular. This reflection will involve two parts, a discussion, and a writer’s journal. Part I – Reflect and Respond to the questions about “The Learning Process.” Part II – Reflect and Submit your writer’s journal reflection to “The Learning Process.” What does the term “learning process” mean to you? How does one learn according to your understanding? Where does your sense (or definition) of “the learning process” come from? Please give these questions some thought; share your reflections with your classmates, read what they have to say, and then respond to the posts of 1 or 2 of your peers. A typical post is 1 or 2 short paragraphs. The learning process, in my opinion, is a period of time you spend to obtain a speical area of knowledge or a special technique. During this period, you will get acess to a variety of learning materials, obtain the ideas or the guidelines from these materials, understand these ideas and guidelines and practice them in your daily life or some special circumstances. According my understanding, one learn from materials or other ones' sharing, understand them and practice what they have learned. Only through these steps could one person learn what he or she what to learn successfully.
However, I was also inspired by reviewing other people's opinions and the teacher's comments to this question. BellaDD used the example of how people learn to fix the pipes to show us the process of learning. To conclude, he give us four items, 1)Find a topic, 2)Get information about this topic, 3)See what others have to say/do about this topic and 4) Participate in it yourself. The using of examples and her short and clear conclusions were convincing. Some other people mentioned that learning process is a never ending process, from ancient to now and to the future for the human being, from birth to death for a person. This was also a good point to the characteristics of learning process. In Elzettte's comments, she said that learning came from repetition. She also quoted her mother's words "earn something not just to remember it, but to KNOW it. " It is true in my opinion because I learn the rap song from Ed shreen by over 100 times repetition. At first, I could not speak very fast no mention to sing the lyrics with the fast pace of the music. However, the situation is improved significantly after a long time of repetition and practising. In hamarek(staff)'s reply to Langers365, she said that "failure tends to make us feel uncomfortable, and as we age, we try to avoid situations that make us feel uncomfortable. Failing is a great practice, it makes us vulnerable and shows us what we need to learn. To embrace this step in the learning process can help any learner grow". This also made me to rethink the failure I have experienced and what I have learned from my failure before. My sense of learning process comes from my personal learning practise both during my study period and my working stage. I should mention that I have tried a variety of ways of learning for a couple of years. Before my colledge, I, as an ordinary student in China, got a traditional way of education, during which the teacher and the textbooks play dominate roles. Students seldom asked questions and had few opportunity to communicate with each other especially in the classroom. Right now, I am participating online courses and joining a online community to learn English writing. This is a totally different way of learning when compares with the Chinese school education. Furthermore, during my working time, sometimes I just try to learn some techniques or finish some tasks by informal learning progress as soon as possible which include some personal web searching or the guidence from my friends or workmates. And now, I can also say that some of my sense of learning process also come from my review from other people's opinions about this topic. At last, I hope this essay helps me to build a deeper understanding of learning process and throng this online course, a totally different learning environment from my former experience, I could improve my writing and critical thiking skills, both in English and my native language, step by step. - What do you find surprising about the course outcomes?
- What do you find confusing about the course outcomes? - What do the course outcomes tell you about academic writing, and how is this different from or similar to writing you do in other contexts of your life? Be sure to be as detailed and thorough as possible, and use examples to help explain your response. When I first read the course's outcomes, I was surprised by the number of items at the first glance. There were four main outcomes for this course and each of them contained four to seven smaller items. In addtion to some basic pricinples raltated to the composition, such as Rhetorical and conventional knowledge, the goals of this course also included writing process and critical thinking, which were easy to be ignored during our daily practice and my former learning about the English writing. At last, habits of mind were also be introduced in the page of course outcome. These were also not traditional knowledge which should be included in a writing course, but vital to our future success. After reading these introductions, I had a deeper understanding about the content of this course and value the following practise woule bring to me. Frankly speaking, I was also a little bit confused about the above content. In which way this course could teach us so much knowledge in such a short time? What kind of practise should we do in order to achieve so many outcomes? Research suggest that people's mind are difficult to be changed when they become adults. In our daily life, we can find that few people could . Therefore, whether could we tranform our orignial habits of minds through this course? When I preparing for my IELTS test, I found that the writing part is the most difficult one. My instinct tole me that I should remember a large number of words, sentences and paragraphs. However, it seems that I am a bad learner in terms of memory. So, I also hope to find the answer for the role of memorising in writing learning. Is it very important for this course and realising the outcomes? What is more, when I try to read the outcomes in detail, I do not find any words related to the vacabulary, collations, cohension, grammar and the technique about focus on the subject. My further question, or I can say confusion, is that whether the aspects I mentioned earlier are not so important during this course or we can achieve these naturally after we obtain the outcomes of the course. The course outcomes also let me pay attention to the conventions, gengres and rhetorical knowledge when I try to finish an academic writing in the future. In Outcome 4, we can find that we should "practice applying citation conventions systematically" in our own work. In my opinion, this is vital important when we doing an academic essay. We can always find the well-structured citations in academic reports and published papers. Furthermore, when we talk about the rhetorical knowlege, there are significantly differences between writing academic essays and other literature articles and bussiness letters. Academic works do have their own languge. On the contrary, it is obvious that critical thinking and a proper writing process will be needed whenever and whatever we write. In conclusion, the outcomes of the course give me a suprise in terms of its number and broadly coverning. This inspires me about the English writing style and some rules which should be highly regardly in the composition no matter when we writing academic ones or other kinds of writings. |
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