Junting Liang

CWR1A Section 23
May 9, 2019
A Refreshing Challenge: College Writing R1A
In this semester, the College Writing R1A course has been a big challenge for me. I

suppose the key word for myself in this course to be “refreshing.” I have never experienced

such type of intensive course about reading and writing. The course taught me to read, think,

and write in brand new ways. It overturned many of my thoughts about working with

literature.

The greatest challenge for me in this course was writing the text analysis. I was not

confident with this type of writing at all, since I had never done well in writing one even in

my mother language, Chinese. The first difficulty emerged in my analysis of David Suzuki’s

The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature—I wrote too much text summary

instead of offering my evaluation to Suzuki’s points. The main reason behind this was that I

could not distinguished well between emphasizing Suzuki’s points and analyzing them.

Fortunately, this did not become a too hard problem for me. Soon, I understood in class on

how to divide my work into what the author says, how he says that, and why is that

important. I looked back to my paper and clearly saw the flaws on proportion of these three

main points. I was able to select the more meaningful content among the summary. To put in

more analyzing, I used the mind map to freely put down whatever first came to my mind

about the context. The map was a perfect source for idea of analysis, since the points were

just my interpretation to the text.

In the text analysis, a big trouble for me was adding enough detailed evidence to support

my claims. I was so confused when Professor Crisp kept suggesting me draw in more details
from the book, since I felt like I have already taken lots of ideas from the author and that

should be enough to support my claims. In the conference with her, I learnt that many claims

of the author I cited were too general, like “atmosphere is significant.” The readers would

concrete details to understand the related concept and generalization. Therefore, next time I

removed the general idea and put “the functions of the atmosphere is important to us.”

However, that was still not enough. Since the functions were mentioned, why not say what

they were exactly? Finally, I added “driving air circulation and regulating climate” to the

sentence. Such revision process happened many times. It refreshed my thought about writing

a passage. It was the first time I saw how lack of detail could make the passage hard to

understand. Details help demonstrating my argument a lot.

The above problems had been fixed mostly in both of my text analysis paper. However,

one other challenge had gone through the semester in different types of writings of mine:

hazy sentences. Writing long complicated sentences was what I was trained to do in my

mother country. In contrast, this College Writing class required me to write in direct and

expressive language. It was an overturn of my education experience because all I had learnt

in my former English classes seemed did not work here. Every I was handed back an essay,

many of my long sentences which I thought to be comprehensive were considered unclear.

Thus, I read the book The Writer’s Diet to see the features of direct sentences and hazy ones,

finding that straight sentences with wise word choice, for example active verb and concrete

noun, were much more expressive. For later papers, I frequently considered how to efficiently

transmit the meaning in direct language. For instance, in the review of Oakland Museum of

California, I tried to describe the displays with as many details as possible in direct language.
There was when I truly understood how to put rich details in straight form to clearly depict

the picture. I also recalled that I used to struggle with reading complicated sentences

describing an object, that really made people confused. Thus, in a peer review section, I

exchanged my essay with a student to see if our writing worked. When my paragraph talking

about Oakland got positive feedback, I got inspired on what the rest of the review should look

like.

Another experience worth mention was practicing close reading this semester. It helped

me develop my skill to think and write analytically about books, exhibitions, and even

videos. I had developed a new habit when reading: annotation. Annotating the text was a new

experience of mine, since before this term I had never seriously done it. In this class, I was

frequently assigned a part, a section, or a chapter of a text to annotate. I found that reading

while taking notes around the context helped me remember what the passage was about and

what were the important points. The process also triggered me to think about the passage

instead of plainly accepting information and forgetting them on the next day. From my

annotations, I was able to develop interpretation to the text in my own words to share it to

class. When I was preparing for the chapter presentation of Suzuki’s book, even though I had

read the chapter thoroughly and mastered the content, I needed the notes to generate ideas.

This journey in College Writing course was filled with challenges. The course content

refreshed my understanding to reading and writing several times. The paper took me lots of

time. Changing into a new habit of writing was difficult. However, the course does help me

develop effective writer’s diets and the useful skill for reading and thinking. I expect myself

to keep what I have learnt here throughout my academic career.