Mateo Gong

Writing 2

Professor Britton

March 22, 2023

A Freshman’s Fresh Look at Writing

When I was signing up for winter quarter classes and saw an opening in Writing 2, I was

surprised and somewhat relieved to be able to knock off a required course from an already long

list of courses I still needed to take. Admittedly, I had some preconceptions about the class

before I started the winter quarter, and in retrospect I perhaps misjudged the content of this

course. This was my first college writing course, and just my second quarter, so truly I had no

idea what I was getting into, despite thoughts of grammar rules and five paragraph essays

running through my head.

This class ended up completely subverting my ideas of writing, especially academic

writing, and changed the way I think about writing – and although that may sound like an

overstatement, it's very true. Little did I know that the title of one of our books, “Writing by

Writing,” would be a key driver in the process of how my writing would evolve.

One of the first things that surprised me in this class was the use of genre. Of course, I

was familiar with the general concept of “genre,” but mostly within the context of describing

books, asking about music, and other traditional uses. However, as Bickmore states, genre in

writing involves writing for a specific situation, and when that “situation seems to call repeatedly

for a kind of writing that answers the needs of that situation” (Bickmore).  Soon, I was thinking

of everything as a genre, from the academic paper to the humble text message. I stopped thinking

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of genre as a concept, and began to “think about genres as tools to help people to get things

done” (Dirk, 252), a tool that I can leverage to increase the effectiveness of my writing. It also

became apparent that whereas I previously thought of writing as more of an art form, Bickmore

notes that genres are both stable and dynamic, making it easy for me to see that writing is really a

delicate balance of both art and science.

Although both writing assignments dealt with genre (as all writing does), the first project

(WP1) really helped me think about genre in abstract ways. Tasked with transforming an

academic paper into a genre of our choosing, I knew that I wanted to do something in the

environmental studies area as that was my major. However, I ended up thinking a lot more about

my genre translation target. In choosing a media critic review, I tried to do something unique and

disruptive to help transform a somewhat staid and monotonous article. However, choosing such

an unconventional genre ended up being a difficult task, as I struggled to find much common

ground between academic papers and critic reviews. There are little to no shared conventions

between these genres, not to mention different target audiences.

 However, after my first draft had been completed and the quarter moved on, I began to

expand my knowledge on writing, and when time came for the revision, I had learned to write

more like a reviewer rather than an academic pretending to be one. The biggest issue in my first

draft was that it was trying to address too big of a topic. My initial review generally

encompassed the entire state of the world, a critique on the system that runs our world. This was

too broad, so I focused on one of the key systems that actually runs our world: Capitalism. As the

field of environmental studies often analyzes the negative impacts of Capitalism on the

environment, this made it easy to focus my writing while also retaining the key aspects of my

review.

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 In our second project, WP2, we were asked to track a discourse community on writing

studies and write a genre translation of our summary. Although this seemed similar to the first

project, I soon learned that I was mistaken when I was introduced to the concept of discourse

communities. According to Melzer, discourse communities are groups of people that share a “set

of common public goals,” and have “mechanisms of intercommunication among members” (102,

Melzer), along with using their community to build rapport and get feedback. Essentially, there

were groups of people with common goals that talked to each other about said goals. Although

this was initially hard for me to grasp due to the scope of the term, thinking of discourse

communities as the “exploration of (mainly) academic genre” (Swales) made it much easier to

apply it to my writing. Since we were instructed to track a topic in writing studies, I chose the

topic of grading in writing as it was a topic that many students often find arbitrary and

subjective. Next, it was time to choose a genre, and I chose the screenplay as it naturally includes

multiple people in it by convention. The writing process for this project went much smoother,

and the screenplay turned out to be a natural fit for the conversation that I was tracking. For my

revision, I wanted to emphasize the fact that this was a screenplay, and so I expanded the range

of actions to inject life into my characters and make it seem more realistic.

Overall, this course took me on a journey beyond the boundaries of a writing paradigm I

did not know even existed, and exploring this boundary exposed new tools and techniques which

changed the way I think about writing. Thinking of genre as a tool has allowed me to write more

efficiently and effectively since I can easily envision what is needed in my piece, as well as what

I should probably not include. On the other hand, the concept of discord communities was

initially more difficult for me to apply in a writing situation. However, as I related critical

components of a discourse community to my own personal situations (i.e., clubs, teams, classes

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etc.), it was easier to understand and appreciate how genre really was a powerful tool for

communication and social action. Overall, I am genuinely excited to see how I will apply these

new techniques in future projects.

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 Works Cited

Bickmore, Lisa. “Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre within Rhetorical (Eco)Systems.”

Open English SLCC, Open English @ SLCC, 1 Aug. 2016,

https://slcc.pressbooks.pub/openenglishatslcc/chapter/genre-in-the-wild-understanding-

genre-within-rhetorical-ecosystems/.

Melzer, Dan. “Review of Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 3.” Across the

Disciplines, vol. 19, no. 3-4, 2020, pp. 278–282., https://doi.org/10.37514/atd-

j.2022.19.3-4.08. 

Dirk, Kerry. “Writing Spaces.” Writing Spaces, 2010,

https://writingspaces.org/past-volumes/navigating-genres/.

Swales, John M. “Reflections on the Concept of Discourse Community.” ASp, no. 69, 2016, pp.
7–19., https://doi.org/10.4000/asp.4774.