Sometimes I think that all writing ever truly is, is saying that one simple truth.
I’ve been sitting for what feels like a thousand hours and wasting it away in hopes that I never have to look out the window again. But I peel the curtain back to see that the sun has gone, and I haven’t written a single word.
The “Superman” poster on our living room wall looks down on me. Superman is bursting from a prison of Kryptonite chains, and assumedly he is going to enforce the ideals of truth, justice, and the American way. I was never really a fan. He lacked the modern day grit of other superheroes like the face-punching Batman or the haggard Spiderman trying to right all the wrongs in his life- and still come out the hero.
I’ve been sitting for what feels like a thousand hours and wasting it away in hopes that I never have to look out the window again. But I peel the curtain back to see that the sun has gone, and I haven’t written a single word.
The “Superman” poster on our living room wall looks down on me. Superman is bursting from a prison of Kryptonite chains, and assumedly he is going to enforce the ideals of truth, justice, and the American way. I was never really a fan. He lacked the modern day grit of other superheroes like the face-punching Batman or the haggard Spiderman trying to right all the wrongs in his life- and still come out the hero.
I guess I like these “heroes” because I know deep down they’re just not what they say they are. They’re just like you and me. Batman fights the injustice the same way any one of us would if given the power- with force and violence. Batman is a dictator, and he is often times only one fell punch away from becoming the next Stalin or Hitler. Instead his no-killing rule keeps him in check, for now. But if history has taught us anything, we are all capable of great evil when given the opportunity.
Spiderman is the probable outcome- by the end, no matter how hard he tries, he is followed by the destitute results of his attempts at salvation. He tries to raise money for himself, and causes the death of his Uncle Ben. He is haunted by his sins wherever he goes, and disaster often ensues by a deed performed with good intentions.
Spiderman is the probable outcome- by the end, no matter how hard he tries, he is followed by the destitute results of his attempts at salvation. He tries to raise money for himself, and causes the death of his Uncle Ben. He is haunted by his sins wherever he goes, and disaster often ensues by a deed performed with good intentions.
So here we have Superman, somebody who is more idea than man. He teaches us that good does exist, and it is worth standing for unafraid, and with an iron fist. Unwavering, faithful, and a true hero for the collective humanity. He speaks true to the age old institutions of love, family, and strong morals. None of that makes sense to me, because I know too much. Superman is a child’s tale. You eventually grow out of him. |
This song usually helps me get back on track...
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What are we talking about again? I got caught up in something for no good reason it seems. I don’t feel good. I’ve dug a hole so deep and strange within myself in all the time that has passed, and I can’t quite find the way out. It feels a bit like descending into madness when you’re left with yourself and the internet. It’s like watching the world zoom by you in a colorful blur through tinted car windows, and your thoughts and impulse steering the wheel from one corner of space to the next. Speaking of windows, I have one in particular I am trying to avoid.
Time doesn’t exist. At least, not for me. Not in this moment. My thoughts become messy, hazy, and unreliable. Everything I’ve come to grasp as real soon begins to slip through the cracks in my head. My consciousness is lost to the ether, and I am naked and alone before all of existence in the universe. Nothing is real, and nothing matters.
It is at this point I realize I’ve been alone for too long, and my brooding is at its worst when I haven’t had anyone to talk too for a while. It is compounded by the unwritten paper before me, just waiting for my honest input. My wife wants to talk to me and see how I’m doing, but she’s afraid of interrupting any “process” I may pretend to have.
I do feel like that sometimes though. That feeling of looking into an infinite nothing, and the shame, hurt, and self-loathing that accompanies it. Its true terror is the time and effort it robs of you when the knowledge of something greater exists in the universe. No, it’s not GOD, it’s my damn paper being finished. Not just finished, but nursed, grown, and raised into this beautiful, living thing that bears fruit and feeds the hungry. For truly good writing feeds the poor. When the collective masses read something that has a true, honest thing to say- they say “yum”. |
But that is a tremendous understatement to good writing, because there is so much more to it. Good writing is a journey. It can be sad, fun, stupid and smart all together. It needs to take people down a mental hole and bring them back to experience catharsis. We are better people for it, if we allow such a journey to take place in our own minds and hearts. We simply must accept the writings call to adventure. The same model of adventure that is hardwired in every human brain from the dawn of existence.
And that is the secret to good writing (let’s say it’s my theory). There and back again, down and then up, life and death- descent, ascent. If writing is all about the journey, then all journeys are about those two things; descent, and ascent. The descent embodies many things; leaving the familiar, traveling into the unknown, and overcoming challenges and obstacles. You are going down a winding, dangerous cave that will try to stop you every step of the way from finding what is lying at the bottom. But once you reach the bottom, you will be different, changed, and the treasure hidden below will bestow you with gifts that will allow you to rise up from underneath and back to the world above. The ascent. You return to the above, and you affect change like a meteor rippling out to the places around you.
This is all metaphorical of course. The descent can be many things; if you are writing about how to help the homeless in your neighborhood, you would have to journey into the systems that are designed already that are meant to support the homeless, and then to face the very problem itself and all of the ways it manifests. The ascent would be to find the solutions, and affecting that change. In a paper, we are told these things, but for the writer, they must go on the journey. Often times they don’t need to actually affect change, but merely offer a solution which in itself is its own ascent.
Sometimes the solution is something brand new that the world hasn’t seen before or considered. Many times, it is merely showing us something that we as a society had forgotten or lost. Truth. Writing that is good will affect a change in us, small or large. If all the writing for the homeless does is make me care just a little bit more than I did before, then the writing is a success. Because who knows how little that change might affect the course of my life, the life of others around me, and history itself. We don’t know the course of events time will take, all we can do is sow the seeds of hope and have faith that one day a tree will grow with strong cedar branches and a river will flow that will quench the thirst of the poor. Changes don’t always need to be big, for even the tiniest ripples in a pond will spread out.
And that is the secret to good writing (let’s say it’s my theory). There and back again, down and then up, life and death- descent, ascent. If writing is all about the journey, then all journeys are about those two things; descent, and ascent. The descent embodies many things; leaving the familiar, traveling into the unknown, and overcoming challenges and obstacles. You are going down a winding, dangerous cave that will try to stop you every step of the way from finding what is lying at the bottom. But once you reach the bottom, you will be different, changed, and the treasure hidden below will bestow you with gifts that will allow you to rise up from underneath and back to the world above. The ascent. You return to the above, and you affect change like a meteor rippling out to the places around you.
This is all metaphorical of course. The descent can be many things; if you are writing about how to help the homeless in your neighborhood, you would have to journey into the systems that are designed already that are meant to support the homeless, and then to face the very problem itself and all of the ways it manifests. The ascent would be to find the solutions, and affecting that change. In a paper, we are told these things, but for the writer, they must go on the journey. Often times they don’t need to actually affect change, but merely offer a solution which in itself is its own ascent.
Sometimes the solution is something brand new that the world hasn’t seen before or considered. Many times, it is merely showing us something that we as a society had forgotten or lost. Truth. Writing that is good will affect a change in us, small or large. If all the writing for the homeless does is make me care just a little bit more than I did before, then the writing is a success. Because who knows how little that change might affect the course of my life, the life of others around me, and history itself. We don’t know the course of events time will take, all we can do is sow the seeds of hope and have faith that one day a tree will grow with strong cedar branches and a river will flow that will quench the thirst of the poor. Changes don’t always need to be big, for even the tiniest ripples in a pond will spread out.
Because in the end, dramatically, the truth isn’t enough. People can’t just know things that are true, they need to want things to be true. My father was a pastor, and he would preach to the congregation that they mustn’t seek Heaven as if it were some reward and that nothing else in the world mattered, but to instead to seek Heaven “now”. Why couldn’t there be Heaven here, now? Heaven on Earth. Do you believe it to be true? Because it can be. He once described Heaven and Hell to me to be these two identical rooms. In both rooms, there is a long table with platters and platters of delicious food. All the people sitting at the table are free to eat what they wish, but the only tool they have is a long fork. Like, a looooong fork. In one room, the people are struggling to feed themselves because they simply cannot get the food to their mouths. In the other room, the people are feeding each other.
I finally look out the window again, and back to my paper. I look like a real hack typing these “truisms” and platitudes. There’s nothing more upsetting then boring yourself. You’d think “you” would at least be interesting to… yourself, but quite the opposite is true. In fact, it’s probably the only reason we get bored in the first place.
But this model of a journey holds true. Consider every story ever told- they all must follow this pattern of descent, ascent, life, and death. A character must leave something familiar behind, enter a world where there are challenges faced and lessons learned. The character returns from their journey changed, and that same change affects the world around them. There is no story that doesn’t fit this pattern, and people won’t recognize your story unless it conforms to some degree. It is the rhythm of life.
And there’s that part of me still that believes in all of this crap. I’m looking at that Superman poster once more, and I think I begin to realize his appeal. It’s because I left out a central piece to my exploration of the journey model. The Hero. The person who experiences and embodies the lessons and gifts of the journey. Superman actually believes in truth, justice, and good ol’ American values. He isn’t weathered by modern day cynicism and pessimism, instead he has a very strong and dangerous thing within himself; faith. Faith that he can be the hero who is unafraid to face the day and pull us from the depths of darkness.
You begin to see that there is a little bit of Superman within all of us, and the day is saved by our collective act as a society to go out into the world to do our jobs, show kindness, and help our brothers and sisters. We all believe in some boring version of hope and common goodness, and it is our faith in that that keeps our world alive. We feed this truth every day to each other, and Heaven on Earth begins to seem like a possibility.
Obviously nothing is perfect, this world is far from perfect. But the need for truth, change, and heroes is evident, and there has never been a shorter supply of them.
I’m tired, and it’s been a long day. I shut my laptop off, the colorful lights finally coming to a cease. The lights go out in the living room too, the Superman poster sits in the dark, and I go to bed where my wife is already asleep. But it’s nice to know someone is there, and I’m glad to have said what I did. I’d hope that it means something to someone, but I have faith it will. I smile, and go to sleep too.
Rough Draft:
Writing Theory: The Critical Eye
My theory of writing is that learning conventions and paying close attention to the requirements of a writing piece or genre will result in a more effective outcome. I believe all “good” writing is produced this way. Good writing is successful writing, and successful writing is writing that fulfills its goals. Whether it is convincing your audience to believe in something, or simply to inform them about something, the goals may vary. But if you devote yourself to a specific genre that suits your goals, you can then produce good work.
I will first discuss the difficulties and struggles I first had when I began the class. I’ve always been afraid to write very much because of my perception of my intelligence, and my inability to stay on genre and consider conventions that would improve my writing. I will then go into my growth in this class, and how I experienced that growth mainly through our first two Writing Projects. My first Writing Project was a massive failure as I did not consider the rubric or genre I was writing for, and my second Writing Project was a success as I had changed my approach to writing essays and tried to consider the lessons that can be learned by merely following rhetorical methods that improved my writing. This is also a reflection of my success in the WPA outcomes (Rhetorical Knowledge, Critical Thinking, Processes, and Knowledge of Conventions), which I will also go into further detail.
In an academic or professional setting, knowing the conventions of the genre are pertinent if you want to be taken seriously. Following convention will often times structure your writing and make it clear to an audience what you are trying to write and the point you are trying to make.
One of the biggest struggles I had when starting this class was the fear of writing; writing that was unintelligent and amateur. It kept me from trying to improve my writing for a long time, and it was made even more difficult knowing that I had no real accomplishments as a writer or notable abilities. It wasn’t until I learned to share my work more often and separate myself emotionally from criticisms that could begin working on my other problems as a writer. Another struggle I had was that I would play this game of “give and take” where I’ll brush over a specific point in an assignment and instead write about something else instead. I think this comes from an emotional impulse and an inaccurate idea of what academic or professional writing is supposed to be about. It’s also that I would just produce bad writing as often time I became off-topic and pointless. Structures and guidelines exist so as to teach of the most effective form of writing to the widest audience.
I found myself and fellow colleagues making the mistake of going off-topic and not following the guidelines provided when doing our Writing Projects, the Auto-Ethnography and Ethnography. The assignments called for people to give insight and discussion into a culture and their sense of self within a culture. People instead took it (including myself) as an opportunity to simply write creatively about personal stories and ideas without the observational and introspective eye of an Ethnographer. The teacher who graded my first Writing Project made it clear that they had a hard time following my writing because it was not focused and lacked many components that the rubric had called for. It was a difficult pill to swallow as I had been very confident originally in my ability to write essays, but the fact was that I did not follow genre convention.
This most likely comes from an arrogant, “me” generation attitude coming into tandem with my own insecurities of intelligence. “If I just be myself, it’ll make what I write to be good.” This is not how writing, or the world works, and this is not how good writing is produced. This is not to say that you can’t be yourself, but you can’t just base an entire essay off of what you feel like writing. A good essay calls for you to fulfill certain points and requirement for it to even be recognized as an essay in the first place, thus the importance of genre conventions.
So it’s not as if genre conventions exist in a vacuum, they exist because they have been found to be the most effective way to write for a specific thing/subject. It forces you to consider both yourself as a writer but also the audience. First of all, it helps the writer stay organized with their thoughts and it gives them the most effective outlet to communicate an idea or concept to the audience. Second, it can reveal the process under which you should think and write your project. This can be a revealing process if you consider free writes and revision to be processes where you put unfiltered thoughts and opinions on page and find new ways to think about what you impulsively thought about before. Finally, conventions are there to help your audience because it gives them a work that is structured and that flows from one point to the next seamlessly. There is a reason people study transitions and essay writing, and it is for the writer to become a master over rhetorical knowledge that they may become the most effective writer that they can possibly be. Of course, it is not as simple as just saying “stick to the rules” because people have a hard time following a rubric or fulfilling an assignment request if it is not understood or not considered to be important.
It took me a long time to learn much of this because I was set very much in my idea that essays could be personal and structured more or less how I want them to be. But by practicing openness and critical thinking, I was able to take the criticisms of my teachers and peers and accept a different approach to writing in general; that genres and conventions exist to help myself as a writer to write to the best of my ability. So the first step I take when writing is evaluating my audience and the goals of my project or essay.
Rhetorical Knowledge, which is a WPA outcome comes into use when evaluating your audience. If you are aware of rhetoric, you are aware of the goals of your paper and the key concepts involved. The time I spent working on my second Writing Project is a great example of me expanding my rhetorical knowledge. I spent time to know how I should go about this project since Writing Project #1 was considered a failure. The Ethnography writing project was extremely useful in showing me how an effective use of convention can be fruitful for an audience or writer. If written correctly, these projects can be very useful in teaching people about a culture or type of person.
As mentioned before, I have also improved my critical thinking skills over the course. You need to be able to interpret and evaluate what you are reading and writing. Often times you will need to connect evidence and underlying assumptions. The habit of mind, openness, was useful in this area of growth in that it allowed me to consider new ways of thinking to allow myself the ability to see something that I hadn’t before. It can be very difficult to see the underlying assumption of something if you do not first open yourself up from you own personal biases to consider what someone else’s biases might be like in your brain. When I was doing my first Writing Project, I was certain that I had written a good project. I was then shocked to see my low grade, and it wasn’t until I broadened my view did I see and understand the course and the assignment I was involved with.
With the outcomes in mind, I could begin developing my processes as a writer. Process is extremely important in producing good work, good work most often coming after draft, and another draft, and another draft, and another draft. At least for me, the most “learning about writing” came from reflections I did and free writes. Revision is also an essential part of the process because it pushes you as the writer to reframe the work you have done with the goal of improving your work for the audience. Maybe you could make it read better in one section or maybe you can put the focus on a particular point you want to make. This is of course a lot of work and can take up the bulk of your time working on the project.
But all of that work would be for naught if you had no Knowledge of Conventions. I have found experience in both reading and writing within a specific genre to be the most effective teacher of conventions for myself. I do not truly understand the function of a convention until I have both read it and written it myself. A hook for example is fun to read at the beginning of a paper, and more so fun to write (but also difficult since good hooks are hard to find and convey in an interesting way). For example, the rough draft of this Writing Project had a lot of focus put onto its hook. But it was long, drawn out, and distracted from the rest of the essay. It lacked depth and application other than being a surface-level segue into the rest of the project. After several writing projects, journals, and peer reviews I can honestly say that my knowledge of conventions have grown and my writing has improved. Just merely spending the time to write projects according to rubric, communicating with peers about what did and didn’t work about your essay, all of these teach you small lessons in writing that culminate into a broader experience and pool of knowledge.
In conclusion, I would not follow directions in the past and I wouldn’t spend the time to carefully learn the specifics and conventions of a genre. An open mind and a critical eye are imperative to become an effective writer. Find areas where growth is needed and give yourself the time to read and follow directions. This is what I found the most useful for myself at least, and it is my theory to writing and producing good writing. Analyze your audience, set your goals, know your genre, and then go into the writing process where you will brainstorm, free write, draft, revise, and repeat. These are all lessons, small and large, that I will carry with me when I write in the future. Writing is hard, rigid work that is being molded and formed every day by the writers who take the time to learn its intricacies and who add to the medium every day. For all of us English Composition students, we should do the same
I will first discuss the difficulties and struggles I first had when I began the class. I’ve always been afraid to write very much because of my perception of my intelligence, and my inability to stay on genre and consider conventions that would improve my writing. I will then go into my growth in this class, and how I experienced that growth mainly through our first two Writing Projects. My first Writing Project was a massive failure as I did not consider the rubric or genre I was writing for, and my second Writing Project was a success as I had changed my approach to writing essays and tried to consider the lessons that can be learned by merely following rhetorical methods that improved my writing. This is also a reflection of my success in the WPA outcomes (Rhetorical Knowledge, Critical Thinking, Processes, and Knowledge of Conventions), which I will also go into further detail.
In an academic or professional setting, knowing the conventions of the genre are pertinent if you want to be taken seriously. Following convention will often times structure your writing and make it clear to an audience what you are trying to write and the point you are trying to make.
One of the biggest struggles I had when starting this class was the fear of writing; writing that was unintelligent and amateur. It kept me from trying to improve my writing for a long time, and it was made even more difficult knowing that I had no real accomplishments as a writer or notable abilities. It wasn’t until I learned to share my work more often and separate myself emotionally from criticisms that could begin working on my other problems as a writer. Another struggle I had was that I would play this game of “give and take” where I’ll brush over a specific point in an assignment and instead write about something else instead. I think this comes from an emotional impulse and an inaccurate idea of what academic or professional writing is supposed to be about. It’s also that I would just produce bad writing as often time I became off-topic and pointless. Structures and guidelines exist so as to teach of the most effective form of writing to the widest audience.
I found myself and fellow colleagues making the mistake of going off-topic and not following the guidelines provided when doing our Writing Projects, the Auto-Ethnography and Ethnography. The assignments called for people to give insight and discussion into a culture and their sense of self within a culture. People instead took it (including myself) as an opportunity to simply write creatively about personal stories and ideas without the observational and introspective eye of an Ethnographer. The teacher who graded my first Writing Project made it clear that they had a hard time following my writing because it was not focused and lacked many components that the rubric had called for. It was a difficult pill to swallow as I had been very confident originally in my ability to write essays, but the fact was that I did not follow genre convention.
This most likely comes from an arrogant, “me” generation attitude coming into tandem with my own insecurities of intelligence. “If I just be myself, it’ll make what I write to be good.” This is not how writing, or the world works, and this is not how good writing is produced. This is not to say that you can’t be yourself, but you can’t just base an entire essay off of what you feel like writing. A good essay calls for you to fulfill certain points and requirement for it to even be recognized as an essay in the first place, thus the importance of genre conventions.
So it’s not as if genre conventions exist in a vacuum, they exist because they have been found to be the most effective way to write for a specific thing/subject. It forces you to consider both yourself as a writer but also the audience. First of all, it helps the writer stay organized with their thoughts and it gives them the most effective outlet to communicate an idea or concept to the audience. Second, it can reveal the process under which you should think and write your project. This can be a revealing process if you consider free writes and revision to be processes where you put unfiltered thoughts and opinions on page and find new ways to think about what you impulsively thought about before. Finally, conventions are there to help your audience because it gives them a work that is structured and that flows from one point to the next seamlessly. There is a reason people study transitions and essay writing, and it is for the writer to become a master over rhetorical knowledge that they may become the most effective writer that they can possibly be. Of course, it is not as simple as just saying “stick to the rules” because people have a hard time following a rubric or fulfilling an assignment request if it is not understood or not considered to be important.
It took me a long time to learn much of this because I was set very much in my idea that essays could be personal and structured more or less how I want them to be. But by practicing openness and critical thinking, I was able to take the criticisms of my teachers and peers and accept a different approach to writing in general; that genres and conventions exist to help myself as a writer to write to the best of my ability. So the first step I take when writing is evaluating my audience and the goals of my project or essay.
Rhetorical Knowledge, which is a WPA outcome comes into use when evaluating your audience. If you are aware of rhetoric, you are aware of the goals of your paper and the key concepts involved. The time I spent working on my second Writing Project is a great example of me expanding my rhetorical knowledge. I spent time to know how I should go about this project since Writing Project #1 was considered a failure. The Ethnography writing project was extremely useful in showing me how an effective use of convention can be fruitful for an audience or writer. If written correctly, these projects can be very useful in teaching people about a culture or type of person.
As mentioned before, I have also improved my critical thinking skills over the course. You need to be able to interpret and evaluate what you are reading and writing. Often times you will need to connect evidence and underlying assumptions. The habit of mind, openness, was useful in this area of growth in that it allowed me to consider new ways of thinking to allow myself the ability to see something that I hadn’t before. It can be very difficult to see the underlying assumption of something if you do not first open yourself up from you own personal biases to consider what someone else’s biases might be like in your brain. When I was doing my first Writing Project, I was certain that I had written a good project. I was then shocked to see my low grade, and it wasn’t until I broadened my view did I see and understand the course and the assignment I was involved with.
With the outcomes in mind, I could begin developing my processes as a writer. Process is extremely important in producing good work, good work most often coming after draft, and another draft, and another draft, and another draft. At least for me, the most “learning about writing” came from reflections I did and free writes. Revision is also an essential part of the process because it pushes you as the writer to reframe the work you have done with the goal of improving your work for the audience. Maybe you could make it read better in one section or maybe you can put the focus on a particular point you want to make. This is of course a lot of work and can take up the bulk of your time working on the project.
But all of that work would be for naught if you had no Knowledge of Conventions. I have found experience in both reading and writing within a specific genre to be the most effective teacher of conventions for myself. I do not truly understand the function of a convention until I have both read it and written it myself. A hook for example is fun to read at the beginning of a paper, and more so fun to write (but also difficult since good hooks are hard to find and convey in an interesting way). For example, the rough draft of this Writing Project had a lot of focus put onto its hook. But it was long, drawn out, and distracted from the rest of the essay. It lacked depth and application other than being a surface-level segue into the rest of the project. After several writing projects, journals, and peer reviews I can honestly say that my knowledge of conventions have grown and my writing has improved. Just merely spending the time to write projects according to rubric, communicating with peers about what did and didn’t work about your essay, all of these teach you small lessons in writing that culminate into a broader experience and pool of knowledge.
In conclusion, I would not follow directions in the past and I wouldn’t spend the time to carefully learn the specifics and conventions of a genre. An open mind and a critical eye are imperative to become an effective writer. Find areas where growth is needed and give yourself the time to read and follow directions. This is what I found the most useful for myself at least, and it is my theory to writing and producing good writing. Analyze your audience, set your goals, know your genre, and then go into the writing process where you will brainstorm, free write, draft, revise, and repeat. These are all lessons, small and large, that I will carry with me when I write in the future. Writing is hard, rigid work that is being molded and formed every day by the writers who take the time to learn its intricacies and who add to the medium every day. For all of us English Composition students, we should do the same
WRITING PROJECT 3: A THEORY OF WRITING
BACKGROUND AND OVERVIEW
A “theory” is a system of explanation, a particular way of thinking that helps to explain phenomena in the world. As writers learn, work, and grow, many of us find it helpful to construct a “theory of writing”: a description of what we understand writing to be and how our own writing practices have worked in the past, currently work, and might work in the future.
For your third project—and as an important part of your final e-portfolio—you will have the opportunity to construct your own theory of writing as a way of helping you to chart, analyze, and enrich your own writing. This theory should be developed from your literacy practices throughout the course and beyond.
In this short essay, you will reflect on your development as a reader, writer, and critical thinker and explain how your learning has led you to a specific theory of writing. Your theory should be informed by your literacy practices and the learning outcomes of the course. It should also suggest how your prior experiences with writing will prepare you for successful engagement in future personal, academic, professional, and civic occasions for writing. Your reflection and theory of writing should be supported by concrete evidence (i.e. quotes, examples, screen shots, anecdotes, and/or other examples) from your own work and composing practices.
Requirements and Deliverables
1. Your essay should include a thesis that makes a claim about what you understand the act of writing to be, and your essay should be organized in such a way that a reader can follow your thinking and reasoning from paragraph to paragraph and within each paragraph.
2. Your theory of writing should illustrate your current struggles, accomplishments, and abilities as a reader, writer, and critical thinker.
3. Your essay should relate your writing and your writing process to one bullet point of each of the four outcome areas of the “WPA Outcomes Statement” (i.e. “Rhetorical Knowledge,” “Critical Thinking, Reading, and Composing,” etc.). Additionally, you should discuss how you used one of the Habits of Mind from the “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” to achieve one or more of the WPA Outcomes.
4. You should support your claims about writing with specific and concrete references to your own work (i.e. notes, process work, passages from your essays, project reflections, Writer’s Journals, feedback on your peer's work, etc.). This support might take the form of quotes, screenshots, excerpts, narrated examples, peer reviews, anecdotes, etc.
5. Within your essay, you should not merely provide support; instead, you should explain what your support is support for and how that support works. In other words, as you offer evidence to your readers, make sure you explain what that evidence is meant to demonstrate or prove to them.
6. Your theory of writing should conclude by suggesting how your growth as a reader, writer, and critical thinker throughout first-year composition prepares you for future personal, academic, and professional writing and research projects.
7. You should include 2-3 multimodal elements such as photographs, hyperlinks to relevant materials, and so forth. You must make sure your reader understands why you are including these elements and why including them enriches your piece of writing. Since you will be making concrete references to your previous work, these multimodal elements could be the same multimodal elements that appeared in your other writing projects or assignments.
8. Your completed essay should have a title and be approximately 1700 words in length.
PROJECT SUBMISSION
- Rough Draft: Your rough draft will be submitted for peer review and to your e-portfolio.
- Revised Draft: Your revised draft should be uploaded to your e-portfolio.
TIPS
- Get started early.
- Review this week’s materials and discussions.
- Set a writing/research schedule and stick to it.
CREATE A FREE WEBSITE
BACKGROUND AND OVERVIEW
A “theory” is a system of explanation, a particular way of thinking that helps to explain phenomena in the world. As writers learn, work, and grow, many of us find it helpful to construct a “theory of writing”: a description of what we understand writing to be and how our own writing practices have worked in the past, currently work, and might work in the future.
For your third project—and as an important part of your final e-portfolio—you will have the opportunity to construct your own theory of writing as a way of helping you to chart, analyze, and enrich your own writing. This theory should be developed from your literacy practices throughout the course and beyond.
In this short essay, you will reflect on your development as a reader, writer, and critical thinker and explain how your learning has led you to a specific theory of writing. Your theory should be informed by your literacy practices and the learning outcomes of the course. It should also suggest how your prior experiences with writing will prepare you for successful engagement in future personal, academic, professional, and civic occasions for writing. Your reflection and theory of writing should be supported by concrete evidence (i.e. quotes, examples, screen shots, anecdotes, and/or other examples) from your own work and composing practices.
Requirements and Deliverables
1. Your essay should include a thesis that makes a claim about what you understand the act of writing to be, and your essay should be organized in such a way that a reader can follow your thinking and reasoning from paragraph to paragraph and within each paragraph.
2. Your theory of writing should illustrate your current struggles, accomplishments, and abilities as a reader, writer, and critical thinker.
3. Your essay should relate your writing and your writing process to one bullet point of each of the four outcome areas of the “WPA Outcomes Statement” (i.e. “Rhetorical Knowledge,” “Critical Thinking, Reading, and Composing,” etc.). Additionally, you should discuss how you used one of the Habits of Mind from the “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” to achieve one or more of the WPA Outcomes.
4. You should support your claims about writing with specific and concrete references to your own work (i.e. notes, process work, passages from your essays, project reflections, Writer’s Journals, feedback on your peer's work, etc.). This support might take the form of quotes, screenshots, excerpts, narrated examples, peer reviews, anecdotes, etc.
5. Within your essay, you should not merely provide support; instead, you should explain what your support is support for and how that support works. In other words, as you offer evidence to your readers, make sure you explain what that evidence is meant to demonstrate or prove to them.
6. Your theory of writing should conclude by suggesting how your growth as a reader, writer, and critical thinker throughout first-year composition prepares you for future personal, academic, and professional writing and research projects.
7. You should include 2-3 multimodal elements such as photographs, hyperlinks to relevant materials, and so forth. You must make sure your reader understands why you are including these elements and why including them enriches your piece of writing. Since you will be making concrete references to your previous work, these multimodal elements could be the same multimodal elements that appeared in your other writing projects or assignments.
8. Your completed essay should have a title and be approximately 1700 words in length.
PROJECT SUBMISSION
- Rough Draft: Your rough draft will be submitted for peer review and to your e-portfolio.
- Revised Draft: Your revised draft should be uploaded to your e-portfolio.
TIPS
- Get started early.
- Review this week’s materials and discussions.
- Set a writing/research schedule and stick to it.
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