Reflecting on What You Have Learned; Reflecting on the Genre

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THINKING CRITICALLY

To think critically means to use the knowledge you have acquired from the information in this chapter, your own writing, the writing of other students, and class discussions to reflect deeply on your work for this assignment and the genres (or types) of writing you have produced. The benefit of thinking critically is proven and important: Thinking critically about what you have learned will help you remember it longer, ensuring that you will be able to put it to good use well beyond this writing course.

Reflecting on What You Have Learned

In this chapter, you learned a great deal by reading texts in four different genres on the same controversial topic and by composing all or part of a multi-stage project. To consolidate your learning, reflect not only on what you learned but also on how you learned it.

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ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a blog post, a letter to your instructor, or an e-mail message to a student who will take this course next term, using the writing prompt below that seems most productive for you:

  • Explain how your purpose and audience influenced one of your decisions as a writer, such as how much background information you provided, how you categorized the information in your report, or how you organized the comparison in your analysis.

  • Discuss what you learned about yourself as a writer in the process of writing one or more of the genres in this chapter. For example, what part of the process did you find most challenging (such as deciding on categories for the report or, for your analysis, understanding the factors motivating the conflict)? Did you try anything new (such as going to the writing center or remixing your writing in a different genre or medium)?

  • If you got good advice from a critical reader, explain exactly how the person helped you — perhaps by helping you understand the kinds of evidence you needed to include or by deepening your analysis of the texts you compared.

Reflecting on the Genres

In this chapter, you had an opportunity to compare genres—summary, annotated bibliography, report, and analysis—by reading the student examples in this chapter and by composing one or more of these genres for yourself.

ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a paragraph or two about your own experience of moving from genre to genre on one specific topic. In your discussion, you might do one or more of the following:

  1. Consider how challenging it was to transform your writing from one genre to another. What decisions did you make as you moved from summary to annotated bibliography to report or analysis? How did your readers’ expectations change from genre to genre? What was most challenging about writing a report or writing an analysis? How did writing in multiple genres on the same topic deepen your understanding and enrich your writing?

  2. Think about the tone you used in each genre versus the tone of the selections you included in your report or analysis. What tone did you aim for and why? How did you craft this tone? Consider how the tone of your academic writing differs from that of your more personal writing and how it differs from that of an op-ed, for example. Why do you think academic writing in general attempts to maintain a fair and impartial tone?