Name: Yubo Wei

Instructor: Joyce King

Subject: Writing 2

Date: 12/10/2019

What I have learned

Through the writing course of this quarter, the most important and obvious

thing I have learned is that writing is not as dreadful as I imagined before I took the

writing course. That is to say, my attitude towards writing has changed from fear and

resistance to habit and ease. For example, I have taken several GE classes that cover

writing. They require two essays of no less than 1800 words a quarter. For me, it was

like lying in a guillotine with a weighted and angled blade that will be released by the

professor at a certain time. (Maybe that's a little exaggeration) I had to be afraid and

worried about those two papers all the time when I took the first lecture. Because I had

no idea where to start, what format to write in, or how to write to get a passing grade. If

the paper is a "guillotine", then its word limit is the "shackles" that lock my hands and

feet. It felt like all of my words, paragraphs, and examples were things that in order to

add up to the word count. All my efforts are just trying to get rid of that "shackles", and

there is nothing that I really want to show to the others.

However, after several writing projects in this quarter, I gradually became

comfortable with writing. Especially when writing a project, what impresses me most

every time is that when I open the word count, I always find that the number of words I

have written has exceeded the required word limit. This is really new to me. For the first

time, I felt that I had something to express and something to write. I could easily write
more than 1,700 words at every turn, and even wrote more than 2,400 words in the

translation project, which is still unimaginable to me. So I went from worrying about how

to add words more efficiently to worrying about how to make meaningful cuts. I've never

experienced it before. In addition, writing assignments became less scary when they

changed from two a quarter to one week. It changed from a “guillotine” that worried me

all the time to a “Small Weekly Challenge”, and by the second half of the quarter, it was

no longer a “Challenge” to me. Figuratively speaking, it is from "Oh my god, I have two

big long papers to write this quarter! I'll be killed by them!" to “Oh, there's a writing

project to write this week, ok, let's get it done."

As for my improvement in writing itself, as I mentioned above, my previous

writing was all about matching word limits, without any consideration for genre,

metaphor, process, theme, or structure. The whole paper was so disorganized and

unstructured that I felt embarrassed when I read it myself. I never read the paper again

after finishing and submitted it directly. But after this quarter, I know how to start a paper

correctly and learn to find the genre of the article to better understand. And I begin to

“read like a writer”. In particular, I made a very detailed study of the genre of economics

papers in WP2. I believe it is not only useful for my writing in this class, but also for

deepening my understanding of economics, which is very helpful for my future writing of

economics papers.

I also learned to pay attention to the two most important aspects of writing:

the thesis and the structure, the parts which I am always struggling with. In order not to

interfere with my writing, I used to leave the thesis at the end, and I found that this made

things worse because it made it difficult for me to connect the disparate arguments in a
single sentence. And also, I've learned that I shouldn't list all the arguments in each

paragraph as thesis, and that there should be a connection to the thesis everywhere in

each paragraph, as well as a connection between paragraphs themselves. So the

problem comes out, how can I do both to get a perfect thesis? And this problem has

been my major issue that I need to concern while writing. Until now, I have not found a

satisfactory answer that will allow me to solve the problem with ease. But compared to

what I used to be, at least I found a point where I needed to improve my writing.

Now let me have a conclusion, it has been a challenge and also an

opportunity for me to take this class. I think I did not miss this chance to improve myself

by getting over the fear of writing and finding the direction of getting better.