In the article “Ten Ways To Think About Writing: Metaphorical Musings for College Writing Student”, E. Shelley Reid offers us metaphors for rhetorical ideas and decisions surrounding our writings to replace the “rules” taught to us as a means of short-cutting those rhetorical principals in formulating our writing, which at this point in our college career and beyond, limit our room for growth.
Consistent across the teaching of writing process is the demand for a consideration of audience (a rhetorical condition), which in an academic venue includes our professor, peer editors, or perhaps worse (and often in my own mind): some elusive academic community at large. All true and important readers to consider. But, Reid, through her examples, suggests that further narrowing of our audience can help us develop what and how we write, so that we are writing in particular. Her examples of how it may look when we ask to borrow money from our friends vs. our parents, or even a bank lender. Or approaching writing a thank you card to grandma, knowing she may share it with her friends, as a way to consider secondary audiences. The details we share, the words we use, and how we bolster what we have to say is going to be shaped more decisively and readily if we have a specific reader. When I write and when I read what I have down, I am going to try to visualize an actual reader (be it my professor, another classmate, or a friend) picking up my essays and reading it for the first time.
Something that really stuck with me was a point made by Reid that the reader is only meant (in theory) to read through your essay or writing once. I don’t know why this was such a nuanced view to me, but it was. Not only to the point she made that it is okay to be repetitive and “chorus” our main ideas throughout our essays, as our reader is not encountering our writing in the exhaustive way we are, writing and rewriting, reading and reworking, as I constantly battle concerns over redundancy, but that because this is the reader’s first time going down this new route we are taking them on, it is not only okay but important to tell them what lay ahead, bring them along with some personal knowledge, “show, don’t just tell” details, and then keep pulling on that connective chord, those central ideas, to tell them we’re still here and still moving this way. It is an important piece of audience awareness, and by nature of first-time viewership of the text, they are going to have more tolerance for (useful) repetition than I credit them.
The metaphors Reid uses to illustrate rhetorical points of consideration in our writing, lead in example how we as writers can “show” rather than just “tell” to make text approachable and easier to follow. But she also offers up suggestions to perform better as readers, with implications in our ability to assist as editors and peer-reviewers of fellow writers and with approaching academic texts, so that we can truly learn from what we’ve read. When I annotate, I often grab a highlighter color or two, illuminating thoughts and bits, quotes, and before I know it, pages of text are striped with neon yellow and pink. Reid draws comparison between the act of highlighting as annotation and that of the barking dog, who only says “Hey!” or simply LOOK! Writing in the margins with “judgement” responses, where you weigh the reading, regardless if you choose to ask a question of “how so?” or acknowledge that a concept or some nuanced point has wowed you (like for me, earlier, when Reid mentioned the reader is only reading your work once!); these are the kind of annotations that are going to allow you to involve yourself with the text, and lead to better learning and recollection of the content. And when applied to peer-review, you can interact with the writing in a way that is useful to helping the writer understand what the text is doing for the reader. And why stop there, when we can do this for ourselves as editors of our own writing?
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