Rhetorical Concepts 

At the beginning of the quarter in UWP1, I learned rhetorical concepts such as audience, context, purpose, and genre. I came into the class with some knowledge about these rhetorical concepts from high school as well as knowledge of rhetorical tools. However, UWP1 has made me see more importance in each of the concepts. In high school, I was taught to always write as if the audience knows nothing. This caused my writing to be overly redundant and simplistic, but in UWP1 I learned that I can identify what my target audience is and assume some things that they will already know to avoid those issues. It seems silly now to think back about how I didn’t really see having a purpose in your writing as important. When I used to write it would be for a good grade and nothing else, now before I write a paper on top of my outline I can write the purpose of my paper in order to keep myself on track and my paper more organized. In implementing these concepts in my research article, I was able to assume that since my audience would be college students that they would understand that college students typically have less money and time, without me needing to explain why. I was also able to remain more organized in my writing process through identifying the purpose of my paper and making 5 key words for my essay before I wrote. 

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Processes

Prior to UWP1, I never thought of writing as a process. To me, you either wrote good on the first try or you didn’t write good at all. This mindset stemmed from when I was in high school and we didn’t write in drafts, I simply turned in my work and after I got a grade back, the essay went straight to the recycling bin. UWP1 introduced me to multiple drafts, peer review, and revision processes that led the writing experience to be less stressful and more rewarding. For the first draft of my research article, I focused on getting the words on the paper; it wasn’t very pretty. After peer reviews and a conference with my instructor, I had the energy and ideas to organize and embellish my research article. In the end, I was proud of the way my article turned out and it was a painless process to get there. Since this was something that I hadn’t really done before this class, I also had to learn how to give proper peer feedback. I did try to implement the guidelines of describing first, saying things that they should do more of, and noting the things that didn’t work as good. However, I definitely feel like I need to practice this more along with reading like a writer, because that will help me to understand why something isn’t quite working instead of just not liking something. 

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Knowledge of Conventions

In the course of UWP1, I was supposed to learn conventions such as form, language, and format that go with our identified rhetorical concepts. In high school I was always told to write with a five paragraph essay format: an introduction, 3 body paragraphs, and a conclusion. In UWP1, I got to explore other methods of organizing my writing. For my research article, I tried to use an effect to cause format where I first explained that college students buy fast fashion then discussed my research that looked into why that is the case. I felt like this concept from the UWP1 objectives was one of the easier ones for me because once I tried to write with a different format, I felt that it was actually easier to get my paper to sound like it had a “flow” and that it was going somewhere. At the beginning of UWP1, unlearning the five paragraph format was anxiety causing for me because it was all I have ever known to do. But in the end, writing without it allowed me to write my research article faster and feel better about my writing. I was also able to try out different formats and languages in my reflection journals. Depending on the topic, I might’ve chosen to be more serious or more casual with my tone. For example, when I wrote 500 words about the Legally Blonde movie, I was able to use a more casual tone to explain why rom coms are the best movies ever. 

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Research

In UWP1, us students were expected to carry out primary and secondary research for our Research Articles. Prior to this course, I had experience with secondary research but the secondary research I carried out was through sources I found on google. UWP1 taught me the importance of looking for more academic sources through my library, and how exactly to do that. In practicing this skill in my research article, I used the UC Davis library website to find my two sources: a documentary and another research paper from a different university. Because of my high school journalism class, primary research was something that I did have a fair bit of experience in. The type of primary research that I did in journalism was mainly interviews, so making a survey was new to me for my research paper. I tried to implement some of the things that I had learned in my statistics class to minimize possible bias due to my wording as well. I think that what I struggled more with was the secondary research due to the fact that I am not used to going through libraries and databases for my sources. In the future when I need to do research for an essay or some other type of assignment I will continue to explore the UC Davis library in order to find more credible sources.

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Metacognition

Throughout UWP1, we practiced metacognition through our reflection journals and through this reflection essay. I think that the metacognition learning objective of this course has been the hardest for me. I really struggle with caring to understand what exactly I did in my writing and reflect on how that impacted my progression. One way I practiced metacognition was with my reflection journals where I was free to reflect on various topics through different prompts we were given. I could also look at the comments on my reflection journals in order to improve my next reflection journals. I did struggle with how much effort it took to confront the things that I knew I needed to work on. I do plan on really looking at the feedback that I get from my research article and using that to further reflect on my writing to improve going forward.