001
Zifeng Li
Reflection Essay
Dear Sophia:
First of all, I have to admit UWP1 is the most unusual writing course Ive ever taken in
college. Instead of focusing on specific writing technique or writing exercises, this course
The ultimate goal of this course for us is to learn how to achieve self-reflective while we are
writing. By doing the activities such as writing cover memos, the reflective journals and doing
the peer reviews, what we really practiced is the universal method of writing a successful essay.
For example, I originally thought that writing the cover memo both for instructors and the peer
reviewers is just for making them easier to read my draft and help the them to give suggestion to
the writer. It now occurs to me that this process is also for me to reevaluate the draft through
identifying the purpose, intention and possible strength and weakness of my article myself and
when I do that, the improvement of my thinking process is already happening and this can be
metacognition process, which is learning how to learn. The assignments you gave us on this
Our first assignment is the literacy narrative. It seemed like it only talked about my memory
of literacy, but what this assignment actually did is making me ponder over the relationship
between my experience of forming literacy and the cognition I have right now. That is how I
past. This assignment actually showed that it is ones ways of read and speak that actually make
who he is.
process of this assignment, you pointed out that there is a deviation from the main topic when I
mentioned the differences between connecting to the audience using a speech and using an
essay. After I read through my essay again, I did find some incongruity in the last paragraph. I
found that my intention was to make a comparison between these two ways and emphasize that
my understating toward how to make a successful speech is more comprehensive after these
events, because originally I thought these means of communicating including giving a speech is
just as same as writing an essay. So what I changed is to write more details about the
relationship between these two means in the body paragraph and more focus on my change of
a process of self-reflective writing, I fix the incongruity at my ending part. Im sure you will see a
After exploring my own experiences of literacy using the genre of personal essay, the
research project of discourse community leaded me to more extensive writing fields and
different genres. In the transition between the two assignments, I learned different rhetorical
conventions may apply to different genres. For example, a personal essay like my literacy
narrative need my personal stories as evidence to support my thesis, but a research project may
argument. The field I chose is the online community reviews and my argument is that the genre
of reviews is easily to be extreme and this can cause some negative effect onto the online
consumption environment.
In the peer review session, I received some comments saying that one of paragraph talking
about how companies are using these extreme reviews to manipulate market environment
doesnt really match my argument Im making. So I integrated that paragraph into the one
talking about the negative effect and simplified the part specifically taking about the methods
these companies are using, which made the whole passage more focused on the topic of
discourse community. At the conference with you, you pointed out that I didnt explicitly show
this phenomenon is related to the field of writing study and discourse community. When I
revised my draft again, I found that this is because I didnt clearly consider who will be the
audience of my article. So I reconsidered the potential audience of my essay and made some
changes. My major audiences should be the people who are interested in writing studies. In
order to relate to that field, I need to add more connections to the field of discourse community.
So I concluded that the phenomenon I stated in the article is caused by the divergence between
the goal interpreted by the potential customers, which is providing objective information and
help them make decisions, and the goal interpreted by customers who actually write them,
which is just an approach to express their subjective feelings after using the products. The
connection is, this idea of the goal of one discourse community is critically important because it
defines the whole community and when this goal cannot be maintained uniformly between its
members and its outsiders, confusion and negative impacts may happen. This made the whole
article much better because its content now focuses on group of people and its more relevant to
the topic. The improvement I made is the result of doing rhetorical analysis to the article. I
learned that reconsider the audience and purpose of an essay can often keep all the words on a
right track. I believe you will read a research project that is much more related to the writing
study later.
After all these work we have down in UWP1, it occurs to me that the purpose of these
reflective activities and these assignments is to make us more successful in writing different
genres of articles in different situations. The idea of metacognition and this method of self-
reflective writing can give us the ability to learn to write all types of article when there possibly is
not an instructor around to help me. What Ive learned this quarter is learning itself and the
efficient learning mechanism of our brain. By practicing the methods like doing rhetorical analysis,
having self-reflective process and learning different conventions, I now have the essential tool to
achieve metacognitive learning, which can help me master different kind of area, even beyond
writing. This is the reason why I think this course is so different, because what Ive learned are not
just some writing techniques, but the universal way of studying which can be applied to all kinds
of area.