Ngofa 1

Nyla Ngofa

Professor Agosta

UWRT 1104-103

July 12, 2020

Response to Jan Rieman

The main points I took away from Jan Rieman’s reflection were the reasons why writers

are often afflicted with distractions and lack of motivation when they are writing. When recalling

how distracted she would become when she would have to write it like how I behave when I

must write as well. As she described the instant gratification she gets from the distractions in

comparison to the temporary feeling of gratification you get in stages when writing, I was

surprised with how well she described what I felt and it gave a reason as to why I kept giving

into those distractions. Another message I took away from her reflection was also the importance

of having and exploring different resources to help cope with the writing process. In response to

her inability to pay attention when writing, she mentioned reading self-help books, downloading

motivational apps, and working with her peers to fix her to influence her into doing better and

aiding her in the process as she does so. In addition, Rieman talks about using the influence her

close friends and family as well as her readers and editors have on her to motivate her into

finding the drive to write at her fullest potential. Rieman’s piece is a reflection because she talks

about her writing process and how she struggles with it while also discussing why she acts the

way that she does when having to write. In the beginning of her piece, Rieman writes, “When

writing gets hard, I make it harder by abandoning it. My brain will do just about anything else

but want to write.” With this quote, we see Rieman call herself out and tell us how she

instinctively chooses to abandon her work because it gets too “hard” for her. Also, when she
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expresses her inability to “stick” with her writing and discusses her reasoning behind it, the

author states that finishing what would be a distraction gives her “a near instantaneous sense of

accomplishment while the payoff [she] gets from writing is through various stages of delayed

gratification.” This quote shows us that Rieman understands why she easily succumbs to her

distractions while also theorizing the reasons behind her weakness.

Reflection of My Writing Process

The ideas about literacy from readings or discussions that most influenced my writing

was the idea that everyone has a different style of writing and that what you write does not have

to be perfect; it just has to accurately portray the message that you are trying to express. These

ideas were important to me because I have struggled with my writing regarding how it would be

perceived instead of writing what I wanted to write. And because this idea that I created over the

years towards, I often found myself losing the interest to want to express myself or interact

personally with my writing. The following artifact is one of my journal entries from writing class

that expressed how I felt about writing which was a consequence of the enforced idea of kind of

writing was acceptable.

So now, I am finding

myself starting to open up more when I write. Like my past writings, when I began my literacy
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narrative, I opted to plan what I was going to say before I wrote it. The following artifact is a

plan I created that illustrates my ideas and the qualities that I wanted my memoir to portray.

To compose my

memoir, I used my knowledge of the three metaphors of literacy, and I had come to that

knowledge during one of UWRT’s asynchronous classes and the idea has stuck with me when I

was writing. I often thought to myself, “What metaphor is my message a reflection of?” The

following artifact is taken from notes that defines, explains, and gives examples of the three
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metaphors of literacy.

The metaphor it represented, “Literacy as Adaption,” served as a guide when I found myself

struggle to find a direction I wanted to take when writing. I used this specific metaphor because

it reflected what my message was supposed to suggest. I believe that my memoir shows how

methodical I am when I write and how I much I go into detail when recalling a past event.

Regarding the decisions I made when finding the right purpose, tone, organization, word choice,

etc., I knew that I wanted my purpose to be evident to the audience as soon as it began, but I also

wanted them to be able to connect with my memoir. As a result, my memoir was a bit more

personal than my other bodies of work. The following artifact is the third paragraph of my
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memoir’s draft. As

displayed here, you can see that my style of writing is more informal than informal, the

descriptions of events and sponsors are more detailed, and my tone is more inviting than usual.

What this process of writing showed me is that you can plan your work as meticulously as you

want, but, whenever you begin writing, what you planned it pushed to the back of mind and your

past experiences mesh together come to mind and make you write what needs to be said. You

cannot really plan a body of work like this; it just comes to you as you write.