Final Theory of Writing

Kristen Barry

August 5, 2016

ENC 2135

Rachel Efstathion

 

Theory of Writing

    

        I stand by my initial theory of writing in that I think all writing has to begin with a purpose, a reason the writer writes, a message, idea, or thought they want the reader or audience to know. Whether the writer’s purpose was to craft a scholarly research paper, or to simply unload their current stream of consciousness through the paper or keyboard, the end product still had a purpose. Just as all writing has purpose, all writing has an intended audience. Like purpose, audience can vary drastically from an intended purpose of being read solely by the writer in the future or by being read by classmates or professors. There is also a difference between a reader, someone who may read a work but not be the intended audience, and the audience that the author created their piece to be read by. Every writer should have a specific set of readers they are crafting their message for, in order to best convey their purpose. My purpose for this theory of writing is to explore and explain my own writing process and how I think the writing process works. My intended audience for this writing is my classmates and professor of this class. While the purpose was generated from the assignment, this piece would be different if I had written it to be read by first graders or as a more informal piece for my friends on social media.

        I placed purpose and audience at the top of my final writing map because I think purpose and audience come at the beginning of the creation of a work, because they help direct the author’s later choice of things like medium and genre. Through medium and genre comes the content of the work, involving choices in modality, design, and assemblage. My theory of writing evolved throughout this class through the knowledge I gained about the importance of these additional key words and reflection. Reflection may be the most difficult term to tack to a particular spot in the process because it is multi-faceted. A writer can reflect on past works to try to understand their own writing process, and they can also reflect on their own choices made in crafting their piece to see how each choice may impact the message that the audience and readers receive. The inclusion of a piece of writing I have done outside of this class on my ePortfolio has allowed me to reflect on a past work, a history paper I wrote in high school, in a unique way. Now that I have learned more about reflection as a more experienced writer, I was able to reflect on how I wrote this piece at the time and how it currently relates to my theory of writing now.

        My first writing map and theory of writing really only involved the writer bringing their purpose to the audience, who should then have an understanding of the writer’s purpose after reading the work. When I made this map involving only audience and purpose, I was almost totally unaware of how medium, design, and genre can completely change how a reader sees and understands the message of any type of writing. I didn’t really think about how everything from the white space on a page to what medium the intended audience might be mostly likely to read can have such an impact on what choices the writer makes. After doing the writing projects in this class and working on the updated writing maps, I have definitely expanded the list of words that I think are key to the writing process. My final map uses the keywords purpose, audience, choice, message, genre, medium, and reflect. I gained insight about the importance of these words in the writing process during this class, and I now know that they are all righteous in their labels as “key”. The assigned readings, our class discussions, and our collectibles presentations opened my eyes to the meaning of each keyword and helped me understand how the choices a writer makes can affect the message the reader sees.

        I changed my understanding of reflection, modality, and medium especially because I had never considered the importance they have for a finished product and perceived message. I now know that reflection is more than simply “looking back”; it is about thinking about why specific choices were made and how the choices relate to the success of the piece. I also learned that a writer can utilize reflection throughout the writing process and to review past works to recall what the process was at the time the work was under way. I hadn’t so deeply considered how images and text can bring something different to a piece like a website, as used as example in Kress’s video about modality. He explained that the text worked as a “frame” to caption the pictures, but the eye was naturally drawn to the images both because of layout and visual interest. Both the words and images play a specific role in enlightened the reader to the message, and text cannot do the same job that an image can, and vice versa. Another thing I hadn’t considered before this class was how the importance of the choice of medium by a writer or creator. Of course, I knew about medium choice on the simpler level that social media is a better platform for reaching young people and print is a better choice for an elderly audience, but this was about as far as I thought about it. After composing my own genres in Project 3 and thinking about the choice of medium for my own audiences, I learned that this choice is a loaded one and can drastically impact the success of the piece. There is usually more than one “right” medium that will work at carrying the message, but there are always some choices of medium that will be better than others depending on the audience.

        My theory of writing has dramatically changed during this short six week class and I think that just goes to show the shallow level of the writing process that I was taught up to this point and that I still have a lot to learn about the wide world of writing  and its processes. I enjoyed learning about genre conventions and how the conventions can affect the writer’s choices. Creating my own genres for Project 3 made me think about all these choices and their effects more than I have before when doing other projects where I have had similar freedoms in choosing my audience and medium.

        My theory of writing and the importance of the key terms we have discussed in this class can be applied to all the writing I conduct in my other classes and writing I do elsewhere, to my friends and family, on social media, and other types of informal writing. No matter what type of writing I am doing, I can still consider how my choices of medium, design, and modality can strengthen the passage of my purpose and message to my audience. I can also use what I have learned about the use of assemblage to put pieces of other works together with my own thoughts and ideas to formulate something new. Reflection is a useful tool that can also be applied to all writing and is something I will try to use more often in other works I create for other classes. Reflecting is an important part of understanding writing choices I’ve made in the past and can help me improve on the success of my future creations.