Theory of writing… sounds like another philosophical concept about writing. But what is it? Well in reality the theory of writing is the ideas that make up the process of writing. All parts that make one want to write about something. There are many things that make up writing and many aspects that everyone sees. There are some that are not as clear to everyone.
Throughout this course I have looked into a lot of the factors that make up writing. These works were assigned as The Inquiry Based Essay, Source Based Essay and the Composition in Two Genres. These three essays were different in purpose in that they all focused on one aspect of writing.
The Source Based Essay was my introduction to the parts that are involved in a situation. These parts are rhetorical situation, audience, author, purpose, tone, genre, and language. All of these parts are things I’ve used in my daily life and outside of my English class. All these aspects are things that not only are related to writing but are things that are very useful when it comes to sharing ideas, why some events turn out the way they do.
Rhetorical situation is something that is almost always applicable to any situation whether it is about writing or not. All situations you find yourself in have a main issue with a lot of constraints like an audience, purpose and the need to persuade them to take action in your favor. I’ve been able to recall this when I want to go somewhere and needed my parent’s permission to do so. There are many people who’ve experienced this at one point in their lifetime. This situation would include me wanting to go to a place as the target with my mother as my audience. I am trying to convince my mother to let me go to that place instead of keeping me in to do chores. This connects to the idea of language. For every situation, you need to use the proper words to achieve your goal. You need to be able to communicate well with others to have success in your situation. This connects to the idea I previously stated about the aspects of writing not only being applicable to writing. There are many real-world issues, especially in politics that involve the idea of trying to persuade people to support you on a specific topic. You need to use the right words to best persuade people or else you get into a position where you might end up losing.
My Inquiry Based Essay was more focused on getting information from multiple sources and dive deeper in my selected topic. For this piece, I focused a lot on trying to get research. One of the parts that was included and struggling with was trying to get the interview. My issue when trying to find an interview was that my topic was relatively new so there aren’t many experts in the area of many educational or speakers that are able to talk to the subject. I did not end up getting an interview for my paper which ended up changing the way I wrote it. I decided to work on the research I had so I had a lot of online statistics rather than the interview which could have added more value to my paper. In order to add some value to my paper despite the lack of the interview, I decided to address topics that are more related to most teenagers today. Adding images and websites that a teen might be familiar with would add more interest to the subject which gives some value to the paper in a different way.
Another tool that helped me improve my essay was peer editing. My classmates were like my readers and so they would be the first realistic readers to see my essay. Although I did attempt to change the style of my essay to appeal to more readers, they were able to point out my mistakes in my essay and suggested changes that would make my essay stronger. My professor was also a very strong help in my paper. He suggested things that I could use to change the style of my essay and what things I should describe in order to make it clearer to the reader.
I have learned a lot throughout this year or writing and hope to use these new techniques for my future papers for future classes or papers. As an author, there are many things you need to focus on. You have to think about your reader, get into their minds as to how they might view a situation. Your purpose, tone and language are important. Purpose gives you the idea on what you want to focus on, how you want to use your information to give out your position on a situation. Tone and language are as important to give that feeling on why you feel a certain way and it allows you to be more convincing if you use some words over others. Of course, the way you format it is just as important as the language you use. Some genres are more eye-catching than others. For example, online posts, memes or any visual genre is much more appealing to some people than a full article about the same topic. Either way I will keep thinking about rhetorical situations I find myself in and how each factor is being played out throughout. I will be sure to use my resources to help me when I am unsure of something in my writing.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
