First Part: I decided to choose from the section Bad Ideas About What Good Writing is and the one-piece I read was “Writing Knowledge Transfer is Easily” by Ellen C. Carillo. She states that the very notion of writing instruction is based on a myth. Ellen states that research corroborates that students don’t automatically transfer what they have learned about writing from one class into the next. The bad idea is that the curriculum for students is to first be enrolled in an introductory course and then it’s followed by an advanced writing course. This is supposed to make students automatically apply or transfer what they learned from the lower-level writing courses to more advanced ones but it’s simply not true. This is a bad idea because the instructors of the courses rely on these writing programs. After all, it works for their curriculum but the students will continue to be unprepared. I don’t agree with this because, in high school, all of my English classes had a specific book we were supposed to read so every year there was a book and an essay aligned together. I used what I was taught in my previous classes in my writing and the mistakes from previous essays to fix the errors I’ve made in the past. Ellen states that there are experiments done in the 1901 which found that transfer is rare and only successful when they were identical elements in the situation or contexts. This is probably why I was able to transfer what I’ve learned from previous classes to more advanced ones because it was always about reading a book and writing an essay about it. I chose this specific piece of writing in the bad ideas about what good writing is because there was another section called “Bad Ideas About who Good Writers are” and I believe that everyone is a good writer in their own way, it just takes time to perfect their own style of writing. I wasn’t very gravitated to that section but to instead to “Bad Ideas About What Good Writing is” because I wanted to know the critiques of authors on what’s considered good writing.

Second Part: For the Unit 2 essay, I will be doing a continuation on the discourse community that I chose from unit 1 which was the Catholic Church community. I will be researching on problem/issue that is miss understood in my discourse community. The problem I will talk about is that many people called themselves “Catholics” but are not informed of the actual beliefs we have or what we do in the church and these misconceptions are believed by the entire world because of what uninformed Catholics represent/show. By what these people say and spread, makes many other religions or just individuals not fully understand what we represent and it leads to further false information. This designated problem is very important to my community because many individuals will think we believe in something we don’t because of what one uninformed person who is part of our community says or does. This problem is probably faced with many other religions and it’s upsetting because people critique harshly on topics they’re not fully aware of.

I chose to read “How Coronavirus stress may scramble our brains” by Laura Sanders because based on the title it sounded like something I could relate to. Having our lives do a 180 in this pandemic has for sure caused an upheaval of stress in many of our lives. Reading the article reminded me a lot of my last semester’s psychology course. It’s honestly one of my favorite subjects in school and it really does capture my full attention. The article mentioned different experiments putting to the test how stress impacts our prefrontal cortex, one of the brain’s important functions for thinking and planning. An interesting thing that caught my eye was how stress impacted medical students taking exams. As Mrs. Sanders states “One memorable example comes from 20 panicky medical students facing licensing exams. After a month of high-stress test prep, the students performed worse on an attention test than they did after exams were over.” This makes me think of my own experience because when I take exams even though I’m confident in the material I never perform to my satisfactory level because I feel so rushed and stressed. Sander does mention “ People who believe stress can be an enhancing part of life do a better job of handling challenges”. I will admit that being stressed about school and exams has pushed me to do better at handling all the assignments and putting time aside for studying. Even though the article was informative it felt a little repetitive. Nonetheless, I think the ideas that were trying to get across were perfectly executed. Specifically, Mrs. Sanders referring to many different psychologists to back up claims. Relating to Dirk I did actually pick this article based on my interest in genre: the science of psychology. Based on the article I read, I concluded it was a research paper. Dirk mentions “If you already have some idea of what a research paper looks like, you do not have to learn an entirely new genre. Instead, you just have to figure out how to change that particular genre to fit with the situation” I have previously written a research paper similar to this article but with a completely different topic. It contained the same outline including quoting research. My experience with reading this research paper and having written my own really helped me understand what Dirk means when saying I don’t have to change the genre just work my way around it to match the topic.