Evolution in Writing

“I have to. This is one of the prerequisite courses in order to get into pharmacy school.” This was my previous answer when somebody asked me why I registered for writing class. Ever since the class has started, I often doubt if this course is really a writing class. I always imagined the typical writing class as a quiet class room, where a sophisticated topic was written on the black board, and students were busy writing on their papers. However, the direction of this class is going somewhat different than what I expected. UWRT 1101 class asked its students to deeply think about various subjects and express their thoughts in the most effective way by considering its purpose and the audience. Perhaps, this is why the most advanced classes required writing class as a mandatory prerequisite.

Via this course, I am making connections with critical thinking on many different topics. I considered myself to be a very wishy-washy person. I do not like arguments or disputing on a topic. When people were talking about certain subjects, I couldn’t help being neutral because I did not want to take a side or think deeply on that matter. As a result, I lost the way to deliberate on many subjects from some point such as politics, economy, social issues, and pop culture, etc. Nevertheless, I am seeing myself changing through this class. The given subject; language and identity, literacy development, and genre that I chose are forcing me to have a perception to see the actual problem in depth. In this way, it allowed me to induce an argument on a subject.

Besides critical thinking, I believe that my writing process is evolving through this class. Like natural selection that Darwin suggested as a mechanism of evolution, the vocabulary that I was using on my lab report had a limitation. Thus, many words that I used to know were extinct from my head due to not using them. Dealing with totally different subjects for writing was enough to revive the hibernating vocabulary from within me. Also, the technical aspects of writing that I was taught during the class alert me to consider the purpose, the audience, and genre before writing. Compared with my past writing style, where I used the order of organizing, writing a draft, and shaping, now I am spending more time on thinking about how I can pass my thoughts to the audience in an appropriate way.

Meanwhile, reading peers’ blog posts is always fun because I see a variety of views on the same topic and I feel like I am getting closer with them by knowing their personality via the blog posts. Some of my peers’ posts offered me a chance to change a paradigm on literacy and genre. Some of their posts made me amazed and unconsciously say “How come they are making the subject so appealing and interesting? How did they make me strongly bond to their blog post?” This ‘jealousy’ feeling sometimes made me go back to my blog post and reconstruct an entire paragraph. Flipping over my post sometimes give me opportunity to have better outcome. Despite my unsatisfied work, peers do not spare to praise and encourage my works. Being praised by peers always gave me courage and boosted me to devote myself on every single post and project. Therefore, I am “tiny bit” proud of my blog posts that I’ve been working on for 7 or 8 hours to show my peers and professor. I believe that I am delivering some interesting points, and a certain inspiration to them (I still can’t say I am proud of it though.)

The ultimate goal of this class is raising my ability in writing for academic accomplishment while considering its purpose and audiences in a proper language and format. Compared with the syllabus description, I set my goal to be a very small portion of the course goal, which was improving writing skills and obtaining conversational English level by communicating with peers. Every day, I am writing something, learning skills, and discussing about various subjects with my classmates and professor. Hence, I can say that I am achieving both goals in a slow tempo. As this class is infinitely asking me to think about something from other points of views, I automatically re-considered my goal in this class. Now what I am pursuing through this course is the ability to 1) establish my thoughts logically, 2) organize them systematically, and 3) express them confidently in any written format.