In the article, “Ten Ways to Think about Writing: Metaphoric Musings for College Writing Students” by E. Shelley Reid, speaks on the ten metaphors when it comes to writing. Shelley points out these ten “Metaphoric Musings” to help college students specifically when it comes to writing. She starts by giving the thesis on why writing is hard, especially for college students. The reason why it is hard is because of the amount of rules that there are when it comes to writing. There are so many rules and we have started to learn these rules since grade school.
Writing can be hard especially when you are trapped in the thoughts of all these rules that you have to follow. With all these thoughts it stops you from expressing the ideas that you want to put in your paper. I can agree to this because I can be brainstorming on all these amazing points that I want to put on my paper but then there is like a cloud that completely covers the ideas that I had in the first place. It gets me stuck to where I just stare at the computer and not type a single thing but instead worry about the rules I have to follow on my paper.
As I was reading this article I liked how Reid gives these “Ten Ways to Think about Writing:” One of the ways that she mentioned that truly stuck out to me was her seven point where she speaks on the struggles that most writers have which is “paragraphs.” Most writers struggle with this because they aren’t sure if they should add more information to a paragraph or make it short. The writers are also afraid of a paragraph that is too short because according to Reid it “can waste a reader’s energy.” With all of these struggles that the author mentions when it comes to writing paragraphs, there is a solution. The solution is to know your audience and meet their needs along the way. You can show this in your writing by separating the paragraphs in which each paragraph has its main idea with supporting details. As for knowing your audience, you can determine whether to stretch out the details or not depending on your readers’ attention span.
Overall, Reid has made some very good points when it comes to writing. She gave out the struggles that we as writers face because of the amount of rules that there are. But, she also gave out some silly metaphors that we can use whenever we are stuck in our writing. These methods are extremely helpful to ease out our thoughts and simply write. I for sure will pick out one or two of these strategies that Reid has pointed out and use it on my paper.
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