To become better academic and professional writers, it is important to understand the tools, or “rhetorical moves” at our disposal when we take on writing tasks such as essays, that we already casually employ (or at least encounter in use) in social media regularly, and further the considerations for our productivity, so that we can make the most of our brains when we do engage in writing.
In her article, “Four Things Social Media Can Teach You About College Writing – and One Thing It Can’t”, University of Colorado Writing Studies Professor Dr. Ann. N. Amicucci draws a parallel between the rhetorical choices we make in our curation of social media posts and the choices before us when we write college essays, including “riffing” off of challenges (or trending posts) and in essays, playing off successful example texts, and how we cater content to specific audiences, shape our sense of self or ethos in our writing, and the stylistic decisions being made.
In the beginning of the semester, when I took on our first major paper of the Literacy Narrative, even an assignment where personal experience is intrinsically inimitable, I remember still worrying that by looking at example papers of prior students’ work, it would influence my own narrative to the point where I’d end up unconsciously copying bits from theirs, or shifting how my own might unfold. But the latter might not be bad at all. According to Amicucci, looking at what others have done right can be a good thing, especially seeing how others successfully develop their essays, so we can do the same for ourselves; and there are certain questions we can ask about the constructive moves they’ve made to apply to our own writing. As the semester has gone on, I have found it helpful to look at the example pieces of other writers to follow general structural and even some stylistic suit for my own writing. In my most recent Process Theory essay (or article), where I studied and evaluated my own writing process, I continually re-read Carol Berkenkotter’s Process Study of experienced writer Donald M. Murray, which served as my own “challenge” or inspiration piece to strive towards. I thought this piece was particularly successful in terms of structure following the scholarly research model, in being informative and insightful, while balancing the author’s own self-insertion, something I struggle with in academic writing. I felt I was able to also insert myself in my own introduction, alongside the information of the field, with personal anecdotes I might have usually omitted.
Amicucci also offered up a nuanced way of viewing or capturing specific audiences to our writing and its content, by thinking in terms of hashtags. Perhaps one of the most important rhetorical considerations for our writing is that of our audience, and yet conceptualizing our reader can be quite challenging. A practical way to pin down the audience of our text is to think about the hashtags we would use for our essays to relate to other similar texts and concepts and consider whether our writing would register with and relate to those to whom we might cast out our hashtag nets, the way we utilize in social media to bring certain expectant eyes to our posts.
Even with these tools in mind, if we want to be the most productive as writers, it is also important to recruit as much of our brain power as possible for our writing; and simply put that means going all in on the task of writing. Forbes contributor, Travis Bradberry, offers up some interesting study results that may change what (or what else) we do (or don’t do) while we write, in his article “Multitasking Damages Your Brain and Carrer, New Studies Suggest”. My mom often proclaims herself to be an incredible multitasker, and wouldn’t you know it: my sister and I have dubbed her as the worst. And yet, I (perhaps delusionally) have still convinced myself that I, unlike her, am a phenomenal multitasker. It’s not uncommon for my writing setup to include a phone by my side, a podcast running or YouTube video playing, sometimes further split between the task of making dinner. This, however, may be ruining my brain cognition and lowering my IQ, according to Bradberry and the research forwarded from Stanford University, the University of London, and the University of Sussex, with findings indicating that those with a propensity to multitask (like my mom and I) do worse at cognitive task than their counterparts who tend to complete tasks one at a time. In one study where participants actively multitasked during cognitive tasks, IQ drops for multitasking in men brought them into the average range of that of an 8-year-old child. I certainly don’t want elementary school Angela to write my college essays, and so when I sit down to write, I will make it a point to do just that, in the name of successful writing and to avoid more enduring effects on IQ suggested for those who multitask. I’ve been scared straight into my single task at hand!
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