Xie 1

Ziying (Iris) Xie

Roberta Wolfson
Writing 2
14 March, 2016
Writing Project 3
Metacognitive Essay
After writing project one and two, I am very excited about this new writing project.
Instead of writing about genres and academic disciplines, I can finally create my own pieces of
writing. Throughout this quarter, I have learnt many things that are essential for improving my
writing skills and creating better future writings. From writing project one and two, the most
important thing I have learned is how to recognize purpose, audience, and context of an article,
and how the corresponding conventions of a genre achieve these goals. Writing project three,
however, is an opportunity for me to apply these skills into my actual pieces of writing, and
throughout this writing process, I learned how to use distinguishable conventions to determine
the purpose of each specific genre, and how to present my open-genre pieces according to their
unique conventions and purposes.
The first step I took was to choose my two genres, when my skills of recognizing
different audiences and contexts of different genres came up onto a useful place. I wanted to
write something different from what I have been written before, so I did not choose online
newspaper articles or comments on blogs. Also, I did not choose academic genres because it is
too serious and too formal, plus there will be many opportunities for me to write an academic
essay in future classes. So I decided to choose something creative, interesting, and easilyrecognizable. The genre came to my mind first is personal emails. A personal email can be

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directed to anyone by me, which means that it could be targeting either a person older and has
higher education than me or a person younger and has less education than me. So I skipped the
personal email and started to seek my second genre. I had thought about a childrens book or a
fairytale for people younger than me, but since I am not good at drawing, I did not end up
choosing any of the genres that need to contain drawings, in other words, I gave up the options of
any other genres that are targeting children. Therefore, I decided to write the personal email
specifically to my younger brother, and thus this genre will be targeting a younger reader who
has less education than me. Then I move my sight to genres targeting older readers. I sensed that
a recipe would be an interesting and creative choice, and it also seems more attractive to me for
what it usually does is to instruct people on how to cook instead of how to write. Since younger
people do not usually cook, this genre is targeting older readers who are most likely to have more
education than me. In fact, throughout this process of choosing genres, the knowledge I got from
WP1 significantly helped me when I was locating any possible genres of the two different
targeting groups.
After I decided to write a personal email and a recipe, I started to identify their unique
conventions, just as what I did for previous writing projects. I observed several examples of each
genre and figured out their conventions by finding the similarities of all the examples which are
distinctive to the specific genre. For the personal email, it has a very marked convention, the
special four-line formatting at the beginning of every email, date: from: subject: and to.
Also, the body of a personal email always contains a salutation, blocked paragraphs, and a
closing. Whats more, the tone of a personal email is usually casual and relaxing. As for the
recipe, the most recognizable convention is its special format as well. It always has a title with a
picture of the dish, a description, an ingredient section, and a direction section. In the ingredient

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and direction section, contents are presented as series of lists and imperative sentences are
commonly seen in the direction sections. With all the practices I have had in the previous writing
projects, I was able to identify these conventions quickly and accurately, which would then
enable me to have a clear understanding of what rules I should be following when writing my
two open-genre pieces.
The essential part of my writings is how I talk about the course concept using sources I
have read throughout this course. I have always been very weak when writing a thesis statement,
which used to make my whole essay scattered and messy. But what I have learnt from this class
about writing a good thesis statement was very helpful and I have already seen my improvements
on this when I received my WP2 grade. So I decided to write about how to construct a good
thesis statement. Incorporating three readings from this course into my writings was a difficult
process, because there really is not a reading that is solely talking about how to write a thesis
statement. Since a thesis statement is a road map of a paper, I started to think about the writing
process as a whole. Purpose, audience, and context are the three most important components of a
paper; they define a genre of a certain topic, and they are the primary goals an author needs to
accomplish in his or her writings. So Mike Bunns How to Read Like a Writer is definitely an
article I am going to cite in my writing, because it talks about how to recognize purpose,
audience, and context when we are reading an article, and knowing these elements is crucial for
people as writers because they will then know how to present their thoughts differently in their
writings when facing different purpose, audience, and context. Another important thing to
consider for a good writer is free writing or brain storming and revising, which is discussed in
Peter Elbows article Teaching Two Kinds of Thinking. I do not usually do free write or brain
storm, and I think it may be one of the reasons why it is hard for me to think of a good thesis, so

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this reading is worth talking about in my writings. Additionally, a lot of people want to write out
something perfect at the first time, such as me, which is unlikely to happen. So Anne Lamotts
article Shitty First Drafts should be mentioned in my writings as well, because accepting bad
first draft is the foundation for us to improve in later revisions. Considering the purposes and
sources of my writings is the hardest part, because I need to structure the contents and think of
possible transitional details in my head again and again, but it is actually beneficial because
when I start writing, it would become fairly easy.
I have never written a personal email about writing concepts before, but based on the
conventions I found, I am able to write an effective and helpful email to my brother. Since it is
directed to my younger brother, I tend to use simple words and sentences, and write in a casual
tone which sounds more like friends talking to each other instead of mothers talking to their
children. And in order to make it understandable to my brother, I need to pay more attention on
the transitions between each paragraph. I started the email talking about random things happened
in our lives as usual, Hows everything? Did you keep exercising to lose some weight? Instead
of writing an email for the sole purpose of teaching my brother how to write, this will make the
email more casual. Then I ran into a transition drawing his previous emails about his concerns, I
got your email saying that you are having trouble with writing a good essay for your high school
application, setting the context of why I am writing this email to him. Then I start to talk about
writings regarding his concerns as a list of suggestions. His main concern is how to write a good
essay, but I cannot really answer him without saying how to write a good thesis, so I wrote the
key of a good paper is a good thesis statement, to transfer the emphasis from a good essay to a
good thesis. But to directly answer my brothers question, I wrote about an essay as a whole, all
of your body paragraphs, topic sentences, and concluding sentences will be connected back to

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the thesis to make your essay more solid, but still related to the point of thesis statement.
Considering the readings are too difficult for my brother to understand, I explain carefully each
main point of the readings by using examples related to his application essay. For example, when
talking about purpose, audience, and context as a premise of an essay, I wrote that say the
prompt of your application essay is tell me about yourself, to explain how these concepts work
in this particular prompt to help my brother better understand the concepts. I then wrote about
free write, bad first draft, and revising, using the same prompt as example and explained in
details. Finally, I integrate the three readings in this email by attaching them to the email as an
option for my brother to read. Throughout the process of explaining these concepts in simple
language, I am able to reinforce my memory of these knowledge, and practice the skills of
applying the concepts into my own writing.
Writing the recipe was a quiet interesting experience, because I need to consider how to
choose my ingredients and how to rationalize my steps. Since a recipe is targeting older people
who have higher education than me, it allows me to use difficult words and complex sentences.
When deciding what should be put into the ingredients section, I thought about the materials that
are already available, such as the readings and the prompts, just like when you cook, you need
some raw materials like pork and salt. I integrate the three readings into the ingredient section of
the recipe, where I list out all the readings and other factors that are necessarily available before
writing a good thesis. For instance, some of the ingredients I wrote for this recipe are the
prompt of the paper and Mike Bunn, How to Read Like a Writer. When it comes to the
directions, I follow a similar sequence as what I wrote in the personal email, from purpose,
audience, context to two kinds of thinking, then to shitty first draft and revising. I wrote
every step in a great amount of details, but instead of explaining each concept as I did for the

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email, I let the readers read the articles themselves and figure out how these concept works. I
basically follow a format of mentioning the readings first, and then tell the readers what to look
for in each reading. For instance, after the first step of understanding the paper prompt, I wrote
read Mike Bunn How to Read Like a Writer and understand what the purpose, audience, and
context of an article are as the second step. I did not write out the definitions of these concepts
because what I am supposed to do in a recipe is to give directions, rather than explain what the
material is. People do not need my description of why sugar is sweet when they make cupcakes;
they want to know how to use sugar and other raw materials to make cupcakes. So, after readers
understand the article, the next step would be to apply the knowledge from the article to the
paper they are writing. Determine the purpose, audience, and context of the paper you are
writing according to the prompt question, using things learned from Bunn's article, here I did
not say how to determine the purpose, audience, and context of the paper, just like I do not write
lift your arm and pour water into the flour in a cupcake recipe. The following steps are similar
to these two, and I keep this train of thought to the last step. In this genre, I am able to discuss
each step in a broader way by just giving directions to the readers instead of explanations; all the
steps together build up to a successful thesis statement, without the restrictions of word choice
and complexity that are featured in the personal email directing to my younger brother.
Throughout this process of creating my own open-genre pieces, I not only learned the
conventions of each genre, but also learned how to write these two genres differently based on
their unique purposes, audiences, and contexts. For the personal emails, I become more familiar
with their specific formatting, which I did not really pay much attention before, and the use of
abbreviations and emoticons, which I rarely used in the past. For the recipes, I know more about
their formatting, as well as the use of imperative sentences in the direction section. Whats more,

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I surprisingly found out that a recipe can be made for almost everything involves steps, not just
for cooking as I used to believe. In addition, the thorough thinking process when writing these
genres was a challenge for me. I used to not think a lot when writing, even when I revise my own
essays, I mostly just focused on grammars and sentence structures, and did not usually think
about the big picture of purpose, audience, and context. However, when I write my open-genre
pieces, I practiced thinking as I were reading these texts and how I would react if I write
something in some way. Are my readers receiving the same message as I wanted them to
receive? Are my writings fitting their expectations in terms of language, style, and format? I
repeat this process for every single sentence I wrote in my open-genre pieces, and I got better
outcomes each time I go back and rewrite. For all of these knowledge I gained from this writing
project as a reader and a writer, I will make sure to remember and use them in my future
writings.

Genre #1: Personal Email

Date: March 14th, 2016
From: Ziying Xie ziyingxie@umail.ucsb.edu
Subject: Writing skillsSuccessful Thesis Statement
To: Xiaofeng Wu xwu2002@sina.com
Hey dear brother,
Hows everything? Did you keep exercising to lose some weight? Dont jog outside anymore,
Beijings weather is TOO bad. LOL
I got your email saying that you are having trouble with writing a good essay for your high
school application, here are some suggestions I want to give you:

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1. The key of a good paper is a good thesis statement. It is the soul of a paper, and coming
up a good thesis is already half step toward success. It is often located at the end of the
intro paragraph. All of your body paragraphs, topic sentences, and concluding sentences
will be connected back to the thesis to make your essay more solid.
2. To write a good thesis statement, you need to know the purpose, audience, and contexts
of your essay. For example, say the prompt of your application essay is tell me about
yourself, so you will be writing in first person such as I, we, us. Since it will be
read by staffs who are in charge of the admission of new students, you want to write in
relatively formal tone, and use mild expressions (e.g. instead of saying I hate say I
do not really like). Also, you want the staffs to like you, so you need to present the
best of yourself, so try to think of your most unique personalities and experiences, and try
to find a way to mention even your weaknesses in a good way (if you are to mention your
weaknesses).
3. Have some time to do brain storming or free writing, it helps you to broaden your ideas.
Say in 5 minutes, you can write anything that comes up to your mind on a piece of paper.
Using the same example of the last one, you might write outgoing, respectful,
experience of Taekwondo, and so on.
4. Once you have some ideas in you mind, you can start to write your thesis statement.
Dont try to write a perfect thesis at the first time, no one can do that, even famous
writers. So NEVER be discouraged by your bad first draft, you can always revise it again
and again. As you ask more people to read your essay and give suggestions on it, you will
be able to revise your thesis as well as your essay better and better.
5. When writing your whole essay, you still need to consider the steps above. But once you
got your thesis statement, it becomes a lot easier for you to write your body paragraphs.
I hope these will help! You still got three months to work on your essay, I believe you will do
great! I have also attached the articles where these concepts come from, you can read them if you
want, but I think they may be too hard for you to fully understand. If you have any questions,
you can always email me!
PS: Dont forget to tell me about your new girlfriend the next time we meet! LOL :-P
Best wishes!
Love you,
Ziying
(Attachments: Mike Bunn How to Read Like a Writer; Peter Elbow Teaching Two Kinds of Thinking; Anne

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Lamott Shitty Frist Draft)

Genre #2: Recipe (see PDF)