Arijit Saha

English 10100

Samantha Bellamy

Theory Of Writing

December 17th, 2019.

 

Theory of writing

 

Everyone has their own theory of writing, everyone writes in their own specific way and calls it their way of writing. For me the theory of writing is what one thinks of their writing, it is the system of explaining a particular way of thinking that helps to explain everything in the world. Writing can be put in many ways, writing could be an expression for someone writing can be communication for some, it can also be information for some. I feel like it does not have a specific definition. Writing is very important and everything I can possibly think of is said and explained through writing. Ideas, books, lyrics, patents, scripts, poems, stories, novels, blogs, biographies, autobiographies and what not everything is shared through writing. 

 

Perspective also matters a lot in writing, the author’s perspective is what gives the writing proper sense and meaning. After learning many aspects of writing in my college classes I see how college level writing and high school level writing is similar yet different. I have learnt many new techniques and methods of writing since the start of my english class. I  have a new perspective of writing almost. The main idea of writing an assignment to me was just simply read analyze and write, but now when I have more in depth understanding of writing I look into in with a different perspective. I have used the techniques I learned from the english class and that just enhanced my writing more. The first assignment of the class was a sourced based essay on a specific topic, a global issue. Many key rhetorical terms were introduced to me which I had never used and tried in my writings. So with the completion of the sourced based essay I learned the application of rhetorical situation, audience, author, tone, purpose, genre, medium, stance, and language. And not only my english class I have also applied these techniques into my assignments from my political science, history and music class. These techniques have further enhanced my writing, since then I have noticed that my grades have gone up by little margins along with positive feedback about how my writing shows better understanding of the prompt given for the assignment. 

 

I have also developed my theory of writing by practising with many writing strategies. To make my writing assignment more cohesive I used peer review and peer editing suggested by my professor, opening up my writing to a new set of eyes and brain really brings out the imperfections and mistakes in the writing. With the suggestions made by my peers and combining with their ideas my paper became more cohesive. Moreover This English course illustrated the importance of many aspects of writing and how they may contribute to the process. In my case, I like to point out how imperative it is to critique your own and each other’s work. Peer editing is a crucial process in revising your draft multiple times to reach the pinnacle of rhetorical analysis success. My peer’s opinion on the essays improved my efforts by showing me the errors in my writing that I otherwise would not have noticed by myself. Moreover, different people have helped go over my drafts. It was always different people who edited my papers so they have a fresh idea about my writing and because of those aspects I was able to fix whatever mistakes I made and did not see. The three different assignment I did will show my gradual improvement one after the other.  The peer editing process helped me revise and rebuild all my essay drafts, along with one to one conference with the professor. 

 

Inquiry based essay was one of the essays I did during the semester. For this essay we had to choose a topic for the inquiry based essay. We had to search up relatable source for that topic and had to write pros and cons for it. It was a very interesting assignment I did during the semester. I did a first draft before the final essay which helped me a lot to improve my final essay.  Before I used to struggle with putting my thoughts together for the topic. After doing this assignment I learned how to organize and put my thoughts into the topic. This also helped me to do critical analysis so that the reader can understand what my topic is about. This type of analysis helped me understand better what the author was trying to convey  so that the audience can understand better which also helped me explain it better in my essays later on. One issue that I have changed is the way I plot out my essays. The way I was going about it before did not work for me because of the format that my previous teachers required. Now, after getting into college,  I can freely set up my essays in a way that I am comfortable with and can understand if I need to look back at them later. Another thing that has specifically changed about my writing is the word choice I decide to use. I find myself using more sophisticated words when writing my sentences that I never paid attention to back in high school. I did many fun assignments during this English 10100 class. Composition of genre was one of the assignments where I only got to draw cartoon. I choose cartoon and blog post for my genre for the topic I was assigned on. I did cartoons and blog post because I feel like it is very easy and convenient way to express my topic to my audience, which is also very engaging and straightforward to understand. I got to learn how to connect my audience through my assignment and it was very easy when I did the assignment composition of genre. These assignments changed my technique of writing an essay, which will help me in future to develop my writing skills to be better and more efficient. Outside of english class my improved knowledge of writing helped me, as I mentioned earlier my overall grades for writing papers increased in my political science class. 

 

In conclusion, I am sure that I developed into a writer that I was never before. I feel like I explored all the course learning outcomes and demonstrate that I understood the rhetorical terms. After writing every essay we had to write the self-reflection essays where we reflected about our purpose, exigence, audience, genre, stance. It took me some time to understand this rhetorical situation but when I was able to understand it my writing became clearer and easier to follow through. My biggest problem was the organization of my essay but now I feel like I have gotten better at it. This english composition class changed the way I used to think of an english class and the assignments coming out of highschool. Overall I had many realizations about writing and its true values.