Antonio Garcia
Professor Garcia
ENGL 5
20 November 2023
My Theory of Writing
My experience with writing has always been rough. I always seemed to have a difficult time expressing my thoughts through writing which led me to the belief that I was not proficient at writing. My thoughts on writing have significantly changed as I attended this class. I have also changed the way I write my essays as well as the tone I write them. The first important tool that I learned was how to write a shitty first draft. Using my literacy narrative as a test for this tool allowed me to better my academic writing. The second tool I learned was how to write with a purpose. Learning the importance of knowing your audience and using rhetoric to support a claim has become an important tool in my academic writing. Finally, the helpful tool was developing a strategy on how I go find research for the essay that I am writing and going to the right places to look for information. In ENGL 5 I learned to write better first drafts, detect the audience, use rhetoric to incorporate into my writing, and effectively structure my research essays.
The process of learning how to write “Shitty First Drafts” allowed me to develop my writing strategy. Before reading this article my process of writing a first draft was writing my introduction first, then working on my body paragraphs and leaving the conclusion at the end. After reading the “Shitty First Drafts” article I decided that I should focus more on writing my body paragraphs first and following with the introduction and conclusion last. Implementing this into my first essay which was my literacy Narrative allowed me to get a structure of what my essay was going to highlight. In writing this essay I first started by going straight to my body paragraph and working on the conclusion and introduction at the end. I was able to identify what my essay was about and it resulted in a concise introduction and conclusion. I implemented this tool into the following essay in this class and I finalized my strategy for writing an essay. Which was just writing what came into my mind, mainly focusing on the body paragraphs and leaving the introduction and conclusion at the end.
One tool that I have learned to value in this class is using rhetoric to support your claim. In order to do so we learned that you must know your audience. In module two our class learned the importance of knowing your audience and we were assigned to analyze a TedTalk. For my TedTalk I chose “ Why You Should Stop Setting Goals (Yes, Really) " by Emmanuel Acho. In this TedTalk I was able to analyze the intense use of pathos to persuade the audience emotionally. I stated, “ He explains that during the 40-yard dash, he tore his quad muscle off his bone, ultimately ending his football career and the goal he set for himself.” I was able to conclude that “ Acho also uses pathos to create an emotional state of mind to better persuade the audience of his claim.” This led to ultimately being able to listen to the rhetoric and identify it, allowing me to use it naturally in my essays. Being able to use rhetoric and being able to identify audiences allowed me to excel in my essay in this class because I wrote with a purpose. I knew that for my Op-Ed assignment in this class, I would have to adapt and write in a way that I was not used to. Using this tool allowed me to effectively write an essay for the target audience concerning the topic I chose.
In Module Three, I redeveloped how I go about structuring my research essays. For my Op-Ed, I wrote about Gen Z, video games, and mental health. I argued that there must be a healthy balance between virtual reality and real life. I learned how to argue my point by relating my personal experience to the essay I wrote, “ During the pandemic, I would play eight hours of Fortnite a day.” Including this allowed the reader to infer that I have some authority or relation with this topic. I structured my essay in a way that I started with what I was going to argue, then gave all the facts and in the last sentence I would remind the reader I was arguing. For example, in the first paragraph, I discussed that video games can provide friendships. In the end, I stated, “ The simplicity of video games provides a virtual escape for gamers allowing them to participate in games such as Halo that can also construct friendship bonds.” It allowed me to steal my argument and to remind the reader about what I was arguing.
My theory of writing consisted of learning new skills in class and then applying them to the essays I would write. The first example is learning how to write a draft which put me in a good spot when it came to editing it. I used my literacy narrative to focus on my body paragraphs and put the conclusion at the end. My second example is knowing how to target my audience and writing with a purpose. I used a TedTalk to identify the rhetoric the speaker used which allowed me to use them in my other essays that I wrote. Finally, the last example was knowing how to structure a research essay in my Op-Ed. In writing this essay I acknowledge that my strategy in writing an essay now looks different from my strategy at the beginning of the class.