Theory of Writing
I came into this class with a closed mind on writing. I used
to hate it more than any other thing in the world and I dreaded doing it! Now I
have learned that writing doesn’t have to be a terrible experience. It can also
be very enjoyable at sometimes even if it is tedious at others. Writing is very
important though, because without writing our world would collapse and fall
into discord. Writing teaches, informs, and connects people across the globe. Our
writing can bring us into contact with people from across the world that share
similar beliefs, people who we would never have met otherwise.
I think that lots of things need to be considered when
attempting to write. The first thing is audience, because before you start
working on something you need to know who you’re writing it for. Different
people can receive different messages from the same piece and you don’t want
someone to get the wrong message from what you write so one must take care to word
your writing so that you clearly communicate the correct message to the correct
people. You also have to take into account the type of writing that you are
about to do, because a journal entry is a whole different type of writing than
a technical report, and the context you are writing in needs to be taken into
account.
I see myself still as a beginning writer. I still have much
to learn about writing and I will need to spend lots of time honing my skills
before I become a good writer. Since I am studying to become and engineer I will
probably have a very different style of writing than normal writers. Many of my
future writing assignments will be technical reports and such and these require
more detailed information and hard evidence than some other forms of writing.
This will probably shape me into a writer that is very keen on strict details,
and less keen on assumptions and feelings about things. This will probably
cause my personal writing to be more focused on things such as feelings or
private thoughts, because I already have to writing a lot about hard facts and
numbers in my assigned writing that I won’t want to have anything to do with
those in my free writing. This will cause a very dramatic difference in the two
types of writing for me because most of my writing will either have hard facts
or emotion in them but not both.
I believe that bad writing and good writing is only
dependant on one thing, desired impact. The author writes things to cause a
certain feeling or to get a certain point across to certain people. If the
feeling or point was easy for the desired audience to get or understand then it
was good writing, if not then it was bad writing. I think that one cannot
actually determine if it is truly good or bad writing if the piece was not
meant for them, because how can they say it was bad if it wasn’t written for
them to understand it. The only thing that makes writing good or bad is if the
intended audience can understand it easily.
Writer’s Profile
Over the course of the semester I think I have grown a lot
as a writer. Before coming to the class I found writing to be a horrible experience,
and I dreaded doing it every time I had to. I always thought that the only worthwhile
things to write were technical reports that showed a logical step by step
procedure that helped someone do something or report on what was done, or as a
plain expression of imagination such as fiction novels or other smaller works
of that nature. I also thought that academic writing was about knocking out
page after page of hard researched facts found from other people. After this class thought I have found that writing
can be more than just that, and that you don’t have to have a massive amount of
pages and boring research to make a strong argument. At first this was very
difficult for me especially since the first actual big assignment couldn’t be over
five hundred words. The This I Believe Essay was pretty difficult for me at
first because I just couldn’t fathom that I could get enough information down
in that small amount of space. I think I was finally able to accomplish this
feat with help from my peers and I believe that this is one of the most
important skills that I learned in this course. I am now glad I did that
assignment because it has helped me greatly in my skills on writing the least
amount possible! This assignment also made me become a peer reviewer which I haven’t
had that much experience in being before. Being able to see other peoples work
helped me on my own work because it let me see different views on writing that I
could use in my own. Overall I think that I did a good job in this course, I did
almost all of my assignment way before they were actually due, and I haven’t
stressed over this course that much compared to some others.
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