“Why Study Writing?” (Week 1)

Elizabeth Wardle’s “writing in general.”

One of the most important things that Elizabeth Wardle mentions in her text is that college professors cannot teach “writing in general.” One of the things that I liked most is that she uses examples that we see today and makes a point good point about her argument. She mentions that we cannot write in general that we always even if do not notice it write in particular because we have a specific audience we are directing our text to.

The example that she uses is Reddit posts. Most of the time we think of Reddit as a way for us to escape reality and submerge into a different world. As Wardle mentions, even with these kinds of posts there is a person behind thinking about what is the best way for her to catch the readers’ attention to keep them entertained. Another example that I came up with and that was also mentioned by Wardle is that text will change from person to person, and from workplace to workplace. I have seen this in Broadway reviews. Multiple entities review these kinds of shows, and even when they are looking at the same show every reviewer has their own opinion and their own of writing a review based on their experience and the requirement they must meet before publishing.

Another thing that I found interesting is that she mentions the impact that the idea people have about “writing in general” has on their lives. It was mentioned that most of the time students tend to struggle when changing from a setting they used to know to a new one. Or in the same case, when graduate college students start a new job. Most of the time they are used to a certain kind of writing that worked for them and allowed them to perform better in school. Once they change to a new setting the situation will not the be same and they will start to struggle in class. Something that Wardle states is that most parents tend to get frustrated with their kids when they start having problems in class. The main reason for this I believe is that they got used to their kids doing well in school and all of a sudden they start having issues and their grades drop. Or in the case of a job, bosses are used to paper meeting the requirements they have, and seeing a new graduate student submit something “out of the ordinary,” could get frustrating and will affect the view they have towards the newly hired person.

Lastly, at the end of this reading, Wardle mentions how we should not be discouraged from the idea that what we know about writing might be wrong. It should be the complete opposite, people that would love to pursue writing should take this as an opportunity to learn so they can become better at their job. Writers and students that are going to the workplace should know that everything in life is about learning new things and adapting to whichever environment we find ourselves in.

Catherine Savini’s perspective on writing assignments.

Everyone has at least once in their life experienced a hard time writing a paper for a class because most of the time we do not understand the context in which we need to write it. Catherine Savini explains in an interesting way how students and people that are pursuing writing should look at their assignments so it becomes easier for them to write a paper depending on how they look at it.

One of the main things that were mentioned in this article is that for someone to write a paper they should look into finding a problem that can be addressed in the paper. As was mentioned this will make the job easier because finding a problem and addressing it when it comes to writing a paper for class it’s way easier to write about simple and easy to answer. The reason for this is that most of the time when we write about something that it’s a simple “yes or no” answer we tend to have a hard time finding more information about the already easy-to-answer question. On the other hand, if we write about a problem that could take multiple paths on the kind of information we are going to gather for our paper it will make the research a lot easy and faster to complete.

Questions were also important things that we needed to focus on when it comes to writing a paper. I believe that we have heard this a lot of times while growing up and I can say that I have a hard time finding questions that I believed were good enough to keep my paper going. A question that I use to ask myself a lot when I write papers is “How do you feel about writing about this particular problem?” As I mentioned in my last paragraph that Savini suggested that we lead our paper toward a problem. If the answer to my question is “maybe I should look into something easier,” or “I should ask my professor if they are ok with this,” I know that I have found problems interesting enough to write about. I know this might not be the case for everyone but it works for me. I would like to know what is the best way for you to know that you are going in the right direction when writing a paper.