Ahmed Iftiak

Samantha Bellamy

English 110

December 03, 2019

Theory of Writing

          What is writing? Why do we write? Is writing essential for society or just another way to represent your thought. These are some questions that my AP English teacher asked us on the first day of the class. But unfortunately, she never gave us the answer, she left the school one month later for personal reasons. The substitute teacher did not help us that much so, mostly we had fun in that class and never got to answer these questions. Before coming to this class my view of writing was kind of hazy. I used to think that writing is a form of communication, preserves ideas and information.  Writing allows one to share thoughts, ideas, and opinions without physically representing themselves to the audience. I would not say that this interpretation is wrong. But my view of writing was minuscule compared to the actual vastness of writing. My theory of writing is expressing feelings, thoughts, opinions, ideas, and stories; Basically, anything you want to express. Sometimes people express their feelings about a circumstance through writing, posting thoughts and ideas in social media, sharing or giving opinions to someone, tell stories about something, and finally, describe your understanding of a topic like. Through writing, you can be yourself, can be another person, can be an animal or a creature, you can be your past or future self, you can be whatever you want. I write about what I am passionate about and can relate to and writing is also learning. The learning process that led me to my theory a little complicated.

When I was in Bangladesh, I never did any kind of creative writing. Most of the writing was open-ended questions and memorizations. The first time I encounter creative writing is when my 9^th-grade English teacher asked me to write about my likes and dislikes. It was easy for everybody but difficult for me because I couldn’t speak or write proper English and it was the first week of school in New York. Despite that, I was able to write a little bit and surprisingly that was enough to impress my teacher. It was small but it was my first successful writing. The sophomore and junior years were, moreover a learning process of how to write and read English properly. I was focused on writing good argumentative or essays or doing an analysis of books that did not make think about the writing itself. In my senior year, our AP teacher explained to us that all those processes were developing writing skills and now it is time to apply whatever we learn. This was true because in my junior year I was able to write a good argumentative essay with a strong argument about the topic. But I did not have any specific knowledge about writing. I started to develop some ideas about writing that we share our opinion through writing, for example, the essay question on the August 2017 ELA regents was “Should self-driving cars replace human drivers?” which we were to pick a side and defend our opinion using the article that was given. I was able to make a claim and able to use the readings to defend my claim. This also came in handy in-class debates, picking a side and defend your idea or claim. All this formed my view of writing as a form of communication that allowed us to share thoughts, ideas, and opinions. My interpretation of writing starts to change in this semester

This semester the English course has changed my view of writing has significantly. Beginning of this class we were presented with the key rhetorical terms used to describe every piece of writing. The terms are the rhetorical situation, audience, author, tone, purpose, genre, medium, stance, and language. I was familiar with some of the terms, the audience, tone, purpose, and language, but I never really use them in my writings and to be honest, I did not know how to use them. The first source-based essay assignment helped me understand the terms and their usage. I mentioned in my theory that I chose to write about things that I can relate to and passionate about. I realized this when we were asked to pick a topic to write about. I chose deforestation as my topic because it was on the news and I was curious to learn about this topic. Analyzing the sources that I gathered to do my assignment, helped understand how an author usage the rhetorical terms to deliver their message and attract people’s attention. For example, one of my sources was an article from the New York Times called “What We Know About the Thousands of Fires in the Amazon, the Planet’s Lungs” which I used for my source-based essay as well as in the research essay. Identifying the application of each term in the article helped me understand the author’s view on the topic and how the author used them to address the issue of deforestation. The article was a response to a social media post #PreyForAmazon and the purpose was to inform people about the deforestation that currently occurring in the Amazon. Doing this assignment helped me grasp the full understanding and use of rhetorical terms. I started to develop my theory of writing that writing allows you to respond to a situation and share facts about the situation.

After doing the source-based essay the next assignment was the research essay that we did on the same topic. At first, I thought this assignment would easy to do because making own question and find information to answer them would easy. But using the rhetorical terms made it hard. I had to think about the tone, audience, what I am trying to prove in the essay, the language I am using, the medium and stance. In high school, I did a research essay a couple of times, but I never thought of these terms or use them in my essay. So, doing it for the first time was a little bit harder. The importance of doing the research essay was to learn about the topic and delivering what I understand about the topic. I used my initial understanding of writing to write an inquiry-based essay by sharing facts and describing the situation of the deforestation. Another part that helped me write a well-developed essay is peer review. The feedback I got from the peer review was truly helpful. One of my classmates pointed out that my essay sounds aggressive, which I did not indeed initially.  Deforestation is a serious situation, but people do not give as much attention as it’s supposed to get. Reading and writing about deforestation made me angry and maybe this is the reason my essay had an aggressive tone, I expressed my feeling in that essay. In writing, feelings expressed through tone, unlike speaking, where facial expression also plays a rule. I knew about the use of tone but before I never implement it in any of my writing. Hopefully, I was able to complete it successfully.

The real understanding of writing came when I was doing the composition in two genres. The rhetorical analysis played a big rule in this assignment.  We had to apply the rhetorical terms to develop two genres that would deliver the original message differently and the target audience would be different. Doing this assignment was fun because I was able to do experiments with how I can send the same message that was on the research essay. I did a short story and a letter to the governor. At first, I want to do a children’s storybook to influence young minds to get knowledge about the situation but that would make my audience narrower. Since my letter also has a small audience, so I decided to make a wider audience for the short story. I applied my last part of my theory that you can be anyone or anything in your writing. I wrote the short store from a third-person point of view and my latter was the first-person point of view. I had the most difficulty doing the short story because I was doing it for the first time. But the end piece turns out great, I was able to do a decent job because of what I learned in this class and that was enough to write the story that would fulfill my goal grabbing audience attention. I think about the audience before writing makes it easier to write something. Because then you would know who you are trying to convince and that makes it easier to identify language, tone, and medium. Before coming to this I would never think of identifying the audience when I am writing, but now that has changed. I always think of the audience before writing. For example, before writing this essay I was thinking who is going to be my essay and decided to target the population that has encounter any kind of writing and students who are enrolled in courses that require some sort of writing.

Not only the writing assignment shaped my perception of writing, but the reading also helped me. For example, when we are doing the composition in two genres, we read two reading pieces about student debt. Both had the same message that it takes a big chunk of our life to pay back that debt. Despite being the same massage both we different genres. One was comedic dialogs and another sideshow with the text of real people struggle with debt. Both of those help me understand that in real life the same thing occurs numerous times where we face the same idea differently. And this reading also helped me decide my two genres, gave me an idea of how I am going to do it. The result was more than what I anticipated it would be. To me writing is essential for communication, I don’t think there is a limit to how one can express their thoughts, ideas, opinions, and feelings in writing.

The use of writing is not limited to English class. Almost all academic classes require some sort of writing, except math. During this semester I also did some writing assignments in my history and psychology class. The psychology writing assignment was a study report so, not that much of rhetorical analysis, but we had to draw a conclusion from the results and describe it. There was no specific instruction about the audience or language. But for the last assignment was a case study, we had to design and proposed a study to test our hypothesis. I had made it convince by identifying all the variables. In that assignment, I had to use my knowledge of writing to make a good proposal. The history class was a different situation, I had to write an essay about the effects of the market revolution that continues to this day. For this assignment, the audience could be people of the future or people who lived during the market revolution or people living today. Doing this assignment helped me understand writing is not restricted by time, you can write something today and that could influence future, like most of the books that we read and use them in our writing some of them are century old.

Writing is universal, it’s a process of learning and sharing. People share feelings through writing. We write when we are happy or sad. We create stories that influence so many people. We grew up hearing funny stories written by someone who wanted to entertain us. We hide our intimate detail in our diary, and we write things that we are afraid to share or unable to share. To put it simply, there is no short answer to the question of what is writing? and it is not just a way of communication. It is not limited to one definition and you can make your definition. Every society has some sort of writing and will have in the future.