Writing: Where to Begin? A Response to Savini and Wardle

Catherine Savini’s “Looking for Trouble: Finding Your Way into a Writing Assignment” offers an approach to writing, and a means for tackling (in my opinion) perhaps the most challenging part itself: beginning. Savini suggests that “looking for trouble” can be a useful tool to prompt our writing, by seeking to identify specific problems and questions we deem worth raising within a topic, in efforts to discover a meaningful point of entry into a larger conversation. She impresses the need to evaluate our questions within a variety of contexts, and within the discourse community, as a way to determine the type of questions we raise, and whether or not our questions are worth pursuing.

In my own writing, I have found myself victim to what she describes as a common pitfall when attempting to evaluate the “so-what” question (or “what is at stake?” in asking or not asking the question) by assuming that my contribution has to provide some life-changing perspective or unheard knowledge, when the angle can simply be what is that I can add here, or how do I see this differently? Savini’s four-step scheme for finding the problems that can motivate and prompt writing offers a great place to begin when I find myself presented with the dreadful blank page, and as I press forward throughout the drafting process, while refining my thoughts and position.

Elizabeth Wardle, in her piece “You Can Learn to Write in General” from Bad Ideas about Writing, rejects the existence of a formula for learning to write successfully across the board, or as she puts it “in general”. Wardle asserts that writing is situational, impacted by a multitude of factors such as context, audience, medium, expectations and community values. These are all important variables that differ considerable across disciplines, genres, and modalities of text.

Last semester, when I took a course in Journalism, my confidence as a “strong” writer was dismantled, as I no longer knew how to write for the genre and had to learn the expectations within this new field of writing. It was a new shift in writing purposes, expectations, and audience. When starting this blog post, I questioned the expectations of it. Wardle highlights how every new situation requires navigating the constraints of our writing, and the need to consider all impacting elements at play, so we can write “in particular”.