Describe

Writing is a social act. Writing causes interaction among many different people. For project 1, as a writer you have to submit your draft to your peers. They review your work and in turn you review others works. I was able to review 2 of my peers work and offer suggestions. This opened up some dialog between me and my peers. "I also wanted to mention thanks for the comment about swapping my second paragraph with the first. That should have been one of my questions because when I first wrote the paper I struggled trying to decide whether to leave it where it was or switch it, and now I know what to do with it for sure. My thesis is in the second paragraph so I should make that my introduction." This is an example of one of the interactions caused by the writing process with my immediate peers. These interactions are important for the writing process. Also very helpful was the feedback given from my Instructional Assistant. Through that, I was able to improve the quality and effectiveness of my own essay. The positive feedback on what I did well also helps to reinforce the importance of the social nature of writing. In regards to the writing process, there is always some sort of sharing and feedback with others. Whether that's a tutor, publisher, editor, friend, family, etc. It requires engage with someone else and share your ideas and work in hopes of generating feedback or some related response. For the latest project, I spoke often with my classmates (who were involved in my discourse community my project was on) about the project itself and also for the interview portion. Informally bouncing ideas off my classmates and requesting help in finding an interesting angle to approach the project from definitely shows a social aspect of writing. My angle and connection to language I chose after interviews with my classmates was to focus on some of the vocabulary within the nuclear engineering community could be misinterpreted by people outside the community and how through this specific use of language and vocabulary which we learn through school is important for solving big problems.

Project 3 was not terribly different as far as the social aspect goes. I was able to submit my work to my peers and instructional assistant to participate in the feedback and rewriting process. That is social in itself. The idea of blogs and commentary itself is pretty social in the sense that there is more of a conversation going on and you're adding to that conversation with your opinions and arguments. Generally blogs have comment sections where readers can actually post responses or counter arguments and you can interact in such a way. Blogs are great at providing a medium for conversations and discussions to occur. Project 3 isn't actually posted to a blog where this is possible, but in a real world situation it is definitely possible! This allows you to interact with people locally or internationally since the internet is quite a large and expansive place!

Image source: http://www.tibbr.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Social.jpg