Any class where I get to talk about sports is alright in my book.

Our class of about 20

students from all walks of life opened up my eyes to a different way of writing; one where words

flow off my fingers as dialogue rolls off lips. I was always early to class, at first just by habit, but

eventually my punctuality blossomed into an authentic passion to learn. My row, which I chose

at random, was made up of four other faces that would become familiar to me by the end of the

semester. Some more outgoing, some reserved, but everyone will be missed dearly.

What the course taught me is that despite our varying levels of academic class we all had

intelligent things to bring to the table. It showed me was that we are all filled with ideas and

opinions— sometimes it’s just getting them all out is the hard part.

One of the first things we learned about was first and second order thinking, which I took

a genuine interest in. This was quite a unique place to start, but in hindsight proved to be

extremely useful. We often hear the old adage of being the ball, just be the ball; in order to carry

out an action it helps to visualize yourself in that situation. In reference to English, the best way

to be a good writer is to start thinking how writers think, which is precisely what Elbow’s

thoughts on first and second order thinking forced us to do.

Typically, when I wrote a piece of academic writing, I thought way too much about what

I want to say or the task at hand. I have many memories of staring at a blinking cursor trying to

think of a hook or conclusion four hours on end. Reading about writing, in this case first and

second order thinking allowed me to loosen up the tight reigns that tended to restrict my writing.

First order thinking taught me to let my imagination run wild. Sometimes this can be hard, as the

thing you want to say isn’t always so clear. But by jotting things down freely the words just flow,

almost like ticker tape — before you know it, you’re 1,000 words deep and a page in to your

metacognitive essay.
 Looking back, when I paraphrased what first order thinking meant to me, I noticed at the

time that I described it as “containing a lot of fluff and unnecessary elaboration”. While this is

true, I think with practice one can fine tune the inner speech which drives thought. As Elbow

puts it in Teaching Two Kinds of Thinking by Teaching writing, “We use [first order thinking]

when we write fast without censoring and let the words lead us to associations and intuitions we

hadn’t forseen” (Elbow55). This adjustment is not only something I see in my writing, but, now,

thinking about it, I find myself doing it in everyday speech as well.

Anymore, I parse my words in order to think about what I want to come out of my mouth

next. More often than not, I use “hm” as speech disfluency conversation. However, this

interjection is quite the opposite of disfluency. It is, in fact, this subliminal instance where my

first order thinking blends into second order thinking. It is not the lack of fluency, but more so

the inner ransacking that occurs to find the perfect word for a situation. In this nanosecond of an

instance there is a place where we start to check ourselves and search for words that have

meaning.

Once we were seemingly well versed in getting our words onto paper, it only felt fitting

that we would try to apply it to our reading as well through annotation. See, reading and writing

are intertwined, as in my opinion annotation is just an extension of first order thought. As we go

about reading a passage there are, invariably, ideas that dart across our minds. To annotate

properly is not to write down the most ground-breaking thoughts. It is rather to jot down how the

reading provokes your most intimate thoughts because we all look at things from different

perspectives. Odds are, my thoughts and Cucc’s thoughts are different from Jefe’s and Kong’s.

Whether it be personal connections, or symbols signaling confusion, annotation requires

responding to the text in a way the reader feels fitting. The bottom line in all of this is that our
minds are always coming up with new ways to process information. As we start to make sense

and connect the dots of our haphazard annotations, we can start to formalize what it is the piece

is about.

From annotation strategies we moved on to the crux of the course, genres. I cannot count

how many times I have heard the phrase “genres are everywhere” during this course… but the

statement holds true. The word genre has taken on a whole new meaning in my life. What once

was a word reserved for movies, books, and music can now be applied to aerodynamics and

sabermetrics. Everything is a genre because everything follows a set of conventions. Just like

attributes make up who you and I are as a person, conventions are the genetic makeup for a piece

of writing. “[The]similarities within genres help us to communicate successfully” (Dirk 259), by

applying conventions that strengthen our argument we are able to use genres to take our writing

to the next level. These conventions serve to not only make our writing acceptable, but even

more so an effective way of communication.

For WP1 we were in the driver’s seat, this is when our course shifted away from learning

about genres to applying them to our own writing. We learned about the “arguibilty test” for

devising a thesis, one that makes sure to get the point across and involves refining our

arguments. Essentially, we were learning the conventions that make for a good argument-based

writing assignment.

In order to properly communicate your thoughts and opinions you should follow a tried

and true format. However, the rules for writing are not always so rigid, and WP1 helped us to

find our voices as writers. Here, we see how my inner hungry dog bursts out of its kennel and

into my writing, “Give us your all and you will see why they call us the City of Brotherly Love

— just not if you’re a Dallas fan. No one likes us. We don’t care.” I don’t think I’ve ever had so
much fun writing a paper as I did with writing that piece and I think that is clear when others

read it too.

After WP1, we shuffled a bit. We talked less about genres and more about real life things:

our majors, our big ideas, things that made us dust off the thinking cap in the closet. Going to the

library was a valuable resource and showed us everything that we as students have readily at our

disposal. This week in the course also made me view the role of a professor through a new lens.

Typically, we think of professors as an upgraded version of our high school teachers,

those with higher standards added astuteness. But behind all of the pomp, we rarely think of

professors as students like us. On the contrary, professors are students of thought and knowledge;

just as we as we collaborate, text, communicate about projects, they too communicate about their

scholarly interests via their writing. To connect this back to some of our reading, it was

important to learn about the role of a scholar because they are each other’s’ own audience:

“Understanding the audience helps you begin to see and understand the rhetorical moves that the

rhetor makes” (Carroll 49). Journals provide scholars, like our professors, an outlet to

communicate with the rest of the academic community. When we understand why scholars write

the way they do, it is then that we can feel a sense of belonging in these discourse communities.

Now, I felt a sense of belonging in the scholarly community and just needed to find a

populace to fit into. At the onset of WP2 I tried to find the biggest and baddest problem, and

make it my ****. It is my tendency to aim high, and swing for the fences, maybe that’s why my

baseball career never took off the way I wanted it too, but this is beside the point. Originally, I

sought out topics that would end global hunger and change immigration — who was I kidding.

As I tried to investigate deeper into these topics, I felt so disconnected and out of the loop that it

became hard to find viable avenues for possible research.

 I, then, decided to scrap my broad foreign policy objectives and focus on something that

could keep me interested throughout the course of my research. What was really driving me now,

in comparison, was a genuine interest to learn and research, something that I had not felt before.

Throughout the course I had developed a deep love for reading, learning, writing— research was

a blend of all of that. It was driving home listening to sports talk radio that the idea for

sabermetrics came about, and from there the ideas were abundant. I revised my topic proposal,

and hit the ground running.

It was right around this time that we started learning about jargon which, thanks in part to

the extensive vocabulary of my mother, was not a word uncommon to me. What was interesting,

though, was to see how scholars use jargon to communicate their ideas. This was sort of

refreshing to me as a writer, it showed that I didn’t have to be an expert to sound like an expert.

To Be Totally Full of Crap, But Sound Like You Know What You’re Talking About,

should have been the title of WP2. Please disregard my sarcasm, as I think the task was actually

really beneficial to us as young scholars. In this instance we were doing less writing and more

getting out of our comfort zones. We were talking about topics fairly new to us and trying to not

only communicate them to an audience that has no idea what we’re talking about, but the

arguably more daunting task of talking to somebody who does. WP2 helped us to get

comfortable with vocalizing all of our ideas, voicing them as opposed to getting them on paper.

WP2 was beneficial because it allowed us to show our stuff to somebody well versed in a

topic, we were fairly new in, this helped to set the stage for WP3. WP3 came at a time in during

the course of the semester when all of my other classes seemed to be reaching a peak in terms of

rigor. The task of writing an email is something I have done throughout my college career. I was

not an expert by any means, but it was nice to be doing something familiar for a change. I had,
though, never written an outreach email; in full disclosure most of my college emails pertained to

upcoming absences (whoops).

As the final piece to the puzzle WP3 added some new tools to my belt. Things like an e-

signature and the lack of indentation are somethings that are not only present my outreach email,

but ones that will be a part the rest of my emails from here on out. We kept it simple this time

and focused on the conventions that made for a good outreach email. For as complex as things

got this semester there was peace in knowing that genre analysis didn’t always have to be so

difficult.

When looking to revise WP1, I was pretty pleased with most of my work. As I stated

previously, I put a lot of emotion into the piece and I believe ultimately it helped me write one

that resonated with most people. There were times, however, where my emotion got in the way

of logic.

After going through my reverse outline, one of the biggest things that stood out to me

was the lack of paragraphs. As I was typing it felt like I had a lot to say, however that wasn’t

reflected in the quantity of paragraphs I had on the page. This led me to break down what I was

saying in to finer tuned nesting dolls, so that each paragraph had more purpose.

As I began to break down each bulky, paragraph, I also noticed my topic sentences didn’t

always agree with the point I was trying to make. The content I had was great, but the topic

sentences created a bit of confusion as to what my argument truly was. Take this intro for

example: “When in Rome — in order to truly get the vibe of a place, you have to understand the

language and the culture of the people in it.” What does this have to do with my argument about

Philadelphia athletes and their use of rhetoric. By omitting the first three words and hyphen that
were added for stylistic purposes, I was able to better get my argument across. I was now able to

get right into the discussion that I wanted to have with my audience.

The part of the semester I look forward to the most is the end. That might sound cliché,

but I have always looked forward to taking a step back and looking at all of my achievements

and pitfalls over the past half of an academic year. Reflecting gives us not just the chance to,

realize our mistakes, but celebrate in the things we succeeded in doing.

 Works Cited

Carroll, Laura Bolin. “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps toward Rhetorical Analysis.” Writing

Spaces: Readings on Writing,Volume 1, www.parlorpress.com/pdf/carroll--backpacks-vs-

briefcases.pdf.

Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.” How to Read Like a Writer | Writing Spaces : Readings on

Writing Volume 1, writingspaces.org/essays/navigating-genres.

Elbow, Peter. “Teaching Two Kinds of Thinking Copy - CHAPTER 3 Nee...” Embracing

Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching, New York: Oxford U Press, 1986.