Dear Matt,

Writing is hard. I have learned this (especially this), among other things in Writing 2. I
have learned that writing is not really writing as much as it is revising. Its carving a shitty first
draft, and then reworking this draft until only the bones of the first one remain. Its writing for an
audience and not for yourself. Its giving advice on how to form concise and coherent
paragraphs. Its taking that same advice and applying it to your own writing as well. Its
distancing yourself from your working draft in order to take that advice. Writing is so many
things and this class has certainly taught me that in order to become a better writer there are
some important concepts and rules I must follow.
Concision is very important in academic writing. Everyone likes the main idea stated
frankly. Who doesnt want to get the information and get out of there as fast as possible. Time is
money, people! Yet, when it came to concision I suffered immensely. I could not get my main
point across without first going to Narnia and back. I struggled a lot with concision but only
because 1) I was horrible at it and 2) It is very important! The first reader review helped me
realize that I sucked at concision and that I should focus on revising my paper for conciseness
like a lot. Reading my paper out loud definitely helped me pinpoint where I was too wordy and
where I needed to add analysis. Another hugely important concept is genres. Genres are
everywhere. They govern how, who and why we write. All of the WPs focused on genre. First we
had to decide what genre to write our WPs in, next we had to actually analyze genres, and genres
within discourse communities, and lastly translate genres in which I took an academic article and
made it a corrido or Spanish narrative-song. This class was not without its fair share of
activities. The one that helped me the most in reflecting and bettering my writing was reverseoutlining. This activity allowed me to see where I wanted to go with my paper and what to revise
in order to better communicate my purpose, this also helped me when revising for my final
portfolio.
For my Final Writing Portfolio, I decided to revise my WP2 and WP3. I worked very hard
on my WP2 and got a poor score. After evaluating all the comments I received, I realized that I
wasnt distancing myself enough from my work in order to revise it to the fullest. Also, I
struggled with analysis and the introduction, as per usual. This is why I have chosen to revise
WP2 because I feel that I definitely need to struggle with introducing an essay, which apparently
I am horrible at. Just the worst. I decided to loosely follow the jab introduction where I hook my
reader with a catchy sentence and then provide information, sort of like a pyramid. Also I tried to
add more analysis and took out some evidence that didnt really serve a purpose concerning the
thesis. The feedback that was most useful for this WP was revising my introduction in order to
include what Chicano/a is and how it came to be an important term. This allowed me to
restructure my essay into what the communitys purpose is and how they use rhetorical appeals
such as logos and pathos to communicate their point to students or newer members of the
community. As I did this, I saw that there was a bunch of irrelevant sentences that didnt aid the
reader in understanding what Chicano/s Studies is and how they operate, so I took them out and
reshaped them to better support the thesis.
WP3 was quite a challenge for me because I felt that I didnt really struggle with
conciseness in terms of ideas so I couldnt easily restructure my argument as easily as I did with
WP2. For WP3 I completely rewrote my introduction in order to better explain why I translated
an academic article into a corrido. WP3 for me was quite personal since both of my parents are

undocumented immigrants. WP3 Part I is a corrido or a narrative-song. I grew up listening to

corridos on the radio at home with my dad. The corrido is about two people in my life. I did not
make up the characters. My dad is Heriberto or one of the main protagonists of the song and
Maricela is my Aunt who lives in New York and works as a maid in order to feed her family. I
really do feel that converting the ideas of immigration reform, as proposed by Stoll, author of the
academic article, my Aunt and my dad and countless other undocumented immigrants can start to
see solutions that do not involve mass deportation. I analyze the importance of the characters
within my Part II and also share the steps I took in translating genres. I struggled the most with
meeting the 2-3 page limit. Because of this, I really had to reread my essay and understand the
purpose of every single sentence. Did the sentence introduce anything new, or was it repeating
old information? Did it really analyze why I chose to write a corrido or did it confuse the reader
of my purpose in doing so? A comment I received that helped me form those questions was that I
lacked information flow. I kept asking myself questions like these throughout the essay allowing
me to finally reach my limit. I didnt only take out sentences, sometimes I looked for better ways
to state my ideas in a more concise manner. Sometimes I combined the essence of two sentences
into one or restructured the entire paragraph in order to create flow within my essay. This WP
really showed me what conciseness is all about.
I rewrote both of the introductions for WP2 and WP3 in order to allow the reader to gain
a better understanding of what my essay was really about. I really like my new introductions
because I feel that they are captivating and really inform the reader of why I wrote the essay,
which is what an ideal introduction should do. I have struggled with introductions all throughout
the course and I feel that I am now beginning to craft ones that arent half bad.
I used to be that student that sat down and typed out my thoughts and was done. Oh boy,
how wrong was I?! I now realize that writing is a process that involves genre, audience,
concision, and most importantly good introductions with god thesis. I have improved hugely in
terms of writing concise yet informative sentences, which is still hard but Im getting there.
There is killer papers and smiling professors. I have also learned, if were being sincere here, that
I prefer to write reflectively or creatively. I like to spew my thoughts and have all read them. I
now realize that even in creative writing all of what I have learned in Writing 2 will be super
helpful.
Sincerely,

Carmen Padilla