Dipankar Chakravorty

Writing reflection

When I came to this class I was asked how many writing genres did I know. My answer was only one, research paper. At that point of time I didn’t know how vast a genre could be. Everything that came to my mind was from my high school experience. But then when I was asked what my theory of writing is, I didn’t even know what it meant. I had no idea that my writing could have a theory. Every time I wrote something, I just went with the flow of the assignment. I never thought how it was developing my writing skills. But then I was told by my professor that our theory of writing develops from our past writings. A reflection at our past works done helps us develop our theory of writing. A theory of writing could also change as time progresses. As we continue with our lives we will have to write in different genre types for different purposes, and all these contribute in developing and enhancing ones theory of writing.

Throughout my high school writing assignments, I never thought about going back to my works and explore my theory of writing. My main writing assignment in my high school were writing research papers. I also wrote a couple of argumentative essay for social studies, but they were one, sometimes two pagers. To acknowledge my theory of writing I learnt that even small written genres like writing an email or grocery list can help me develop my theory of writing. Before coming to this class the last writing assignment I did was an eight page research paper on the topic of college tuition. After I submitted the research paper to my teacher I never went back and had a glance at it. But when I think about it a lot of high school graduates don’t know that they have their own theory of writing because they never consider going back and connecting all their past works with each other.

To me the process to develop my own theory of writing came from looking at my past works, starting from high school till now, and finding a link between them that shows how I think while I write these. Now when I think about my theory of writing when I was in high school I think it developed from writing small argumentative essays because that is where I enhanced my writing skills from mostly. Even when I had to write a long research paper, my teacher always made us start from scratch and divide the long research paper into small parts and connect everything together at the end. So my theory of writing in high school was to divide and connect.

Once I joined this class and saw how limited and ignorant I was to all the genres, it changed the way I thought about writing. This class taught me that every writing assignment you do is for an audience and we always have to keep that audience in our mind while doing that assignment. This was the first thing that helped me evolve my theory of writing from high school. I never considered writing for an audience previously in high school. Now after coming to this class and knowing how your audience is a crucial part for any piece of writing helped me change the way I think before I begin any piece of writing. I always think who am I going to write this essay for.

Then as the class kept on progressing I learnt new things. I had no idea about what the word ‘stance’ meant in a writing perspective. But when my professor explained that it meant the authors stand towards the idea that he/she is stating, it made me realize that I also have to state my stance in my writing more explicitly so that my audience can know what my opinion is towards that idea I’m writing about. When I think about it, I have been writing argumentative and persuasive essays through out my high school and these genres are the type where you have to choose a side. So these genres didn’t help me explain my stance to my audience in my high school assignments. But while doing the source based essay, I had to view various different points while finding an article for my social issue. One of them was the author’s stance. Some of the articles didn’t have any stance while some explicitly stated their opinion. This helped me visualize how I should bring up my stance when I do any writing in the future.

This class helped me progress in writing by introducing me to the rhetorical characteristics such as audience, stance, purpose, etc. I mentioned how audience helped me improve my writing skills and how seeing other authors state their stance in their writings helped me visualize how to state my stance for any piece of writing. But all the rhetorical features in general helped me improve my writing skills tremendously. I remember when I was writing my last research paper in high school, all I could think about was somehow stretch the word count to meet the criteria so I could be done with it. I didn’t pay any attention to whether the reader would like this, or does my evidence connect to my argument. But in this class when I wrote my research paper on teenagers being influenced by violence in video game, I had to find a model essay and follow its structure. I had to think about my audience, teenagers and parents, constantly and connect my evidence to my argument in each paragraph. Things I never did or thought about doing in high school.

Writing is something which develops slowly. I realized this when I thought about my past works while figuring out my theory of writing. In middle school I couldn’t organize my essays. I improved that as I was given more writing assignments in high school. Then after coming to this class I realized that I couldn’t connect my writing, which I did before coming to this class, with my audience and also use all the rhetorical features sufficiently. The works I did in this class helped me develop using all the rhetorical features in my works. For example, while doing composition in two genres, I always had to think about my audience because I had to create a genre type which would attract my audience.

My theory of writing after taking this class and having considered all the rhetorical features is that one progresses its writing skills by seeing others work and learning more about using what you learnt. In this class I learnt new things which I got to use in my works I did in this class. And as I progress with my college life, I will get to learn a lot of new things which will help me become a better writer.