The undersea environment is unpredictable. Sometimes the seawater flows slowly, sometimes it becomes rapid. Sometimes you swim across the coral, sometimes you need to hide from a shark. A fish can deal with all those situations freely and smoothly, that’s her swimming skill. Similarly, outcome 1 needs students to understand and write for different situations. It focuses on metacognition. In order to write with ease, you need to practice and then have the skill to recognize the genre and context and then decide the tones to use. What I learned from the fish is writing in different ways to distinct audience. If you read this page and the articles I uploaded carefully, you’ll find out how I resolve the writing “obstacles”.

Like arts have different categories, articles have different genres. I was always making an effort on “employing appropriate conventions to the demands of a particular genre”. (Syllabus) Short assignment 3 is an annotated bibliography on the topic of academic terms. Annotated bibliographies contain the lists of cited works. It’s a planning for a longer and more formal piece of work. As long as the author describes each source and explains the reason of choosing the sources, it can be successful. I chose 3 sources and had two steps working with each of them. First, I talked about the main idea of the source. “In his book Academic Calendars – Encyclopedia of Education, Brenda Ashford talks about the history and the origin of the early semester system, the progress of the development and the change on the two systems, what are the two systems like nowadays and the current percentage use in the American universities.” (1) Then, I had to explain how did the source contributed to my essay. “To begin with a major paper, it’s always appropriate to start with something which tells the audience the background of this controversy.” “The part of the history mentioned in this book can be cited in the intro paragraph to depict the origin of the two systems.” (1)

            Except for the genres, audiences can also be different for one’s writing. In most of the writing assignments, I’m writing to the general academic audience. It is very formal and I had to avoid all the first person statements. In major paper 1, I argued that we should study both the standard languages and the dialects. In one paragraph, I was talking about the dialects in China. “In his essay Sociolinguistics, Branch states that more than half of Chinese citizens are born with dialects as their first languages. (1) The ability to speak the dialects is extremely important in many regions of China especially the Southern part.” (3) Even though southern China is where I come from, I’m not using my experience as an example. I’m stating what is happening as a narrator. In short assignment 2, I’m writing to a researcher about my language-using habit in a specific discourse community. Because I was writing to her in person, I used lots first person statements and the whole essay is informal. “Compare to the other discourse communities I enrolled in, my host family was obviously my favorite one. We used American and British hybrid English words, the sentence structure was not complete all the time and the grammar included many errors.” (3) I was very free to tell her what I thought and experienced.

            I understood my audiences very well and addressed what might be attractive to the audiences in my assignments.  In major paper 1, I was telling the readers some objective and true data. I was not talking about my experience as a speaker of dialect or standard languages. General academic audiences are not interested in my story; they want to know what the fact is. Also, I’m writing in a very calm tone with some academic tones. I talked about what happened in general, and I rarely went into details. “The dialects do show the diversity, but this doesn’t mean a dialect is only a branch of a language. It is the mirror reflecting the culture of the area, the ideology of the speakers, and the heritage of history.” (2) Unlike the general academic audience, the researchers are more interested in what I did and felt. They are not asking for answers, they want to study specific cases. In my short assignment 2, I wrote my language habits in a relaxed tone with simpler words. I was trying to write a “warm” essay making the readers thinking of the similar discourse communities they had. Unlike the formal papers that contain lots of academic sources, I was using my own experience as examples. “I used ‘trousers’ instead of ‘pants’, ‘angry’ instead of ‘mad’, ‘strange’ instead of ‘weird’, and ‘clever’ instead of ‘smart’.” (1)

            In short assignment 2 asking for describing a discourse community, I chose to write about my American host family. This was a good choice because it has most elements that a discourse community required. The major language of the host family was a mixture of British English and American English. It was in incomplete sentences with grammar errors if my host sister and I were talking to my host mom. We have a taboo subject. “It might hurt her feeling if we were being too homesick, so we rarely talked about our nostalgia”. (2) We are trying not to use words related to “homesick” in our conversations. We have to choose different vocabularies when talking to my host dad. “When my host sister and I were talking to him, we would pay much attention on the lexis and syntax for he didn’t know many British English words and our words.” I was trying to use the American English lexis as my word choice. Sometimes my host dad even needs my host mom to be the translator. I articulated and assessed my practices of using British and American hybrid English with my host mom and using more formal American English when talking to my host dad within the discourse community.