Theory and Practice

Knowing Where Your Writing's Going:

Writing as a Connecting Conversation and Audience Awareness for Students

Impossible Perfection

In an early creative writing class, I was told that the worst sin a writer can commit is that of writing something unclear. This idea embedded fears within me as a young poet and storyteller that I would never be precise enough in my writing, that I would never capture the right feelings, that I would never get my points across completely. As I now begin preparing materials for college composition students, those fears that center around linguistic inadequacy remain. I realized this as I wrote my very first announcement yesterday for the English 1102 class I am shadowing. I had to post my office hour—a virtual meeting hour that I will now hold from 7:30 to 8:30 on Wednesday nights—but I wrestled with how to even get that simple message across to a class full of nineteen and twenty-year-olds. Would it be better to say that I hold the office hour “every Wednesday at 7:30pm” or “every Wednesday night at 7:30pm”? Was the word night warranted because the measly “pm” would be easy to look over? Was this wording too redundant? I turned each letter over like imperfect stones in the spring of my brain, hoping I could smooth them to a pebble-like perfection. 

Writing is Responding

Even after more than a decade of writing experience, I find myself worried about what I want to say and how I want to say it. With that being said, I can’t help but wonder how my students—the ones deciphering if they can meet with me at 7:30 in the morning or 7:30 at night—must feel. I say this because, even if we as a society so often think that writing is an isolated act we participate in while hunched over the lonely glow of a computer screen, it is much, much more social than that. According to Kevin Roozen, writers “are always connected to other people” because writing “is always an attempt to address the needs of an audience” (17). In other words, writers are never really alone at their writing desks because “Writing is a Social and Rhetorical Act” (Roozen 17). It took me years to figure this threshold concept out in an abstract way, and even longer to understand it in a direct sense. Imagine what it must be like for students just starting out on their academic writing journey who cannot yet identify why their words feel “wrong” or ineffective. They have no conscious clue that “writing can never be anything other than a social and rhetorical act, connecting us to other people across time and space in an attempt to respond adequately to the needs of an audience” (Roozen 18). They might not see that their own words are part of a grander dialogue that exists between all forms and genres of writing, nor do they understand yet that they are probably aiming to appease more than just the rubric for their paper or even their professor alone. There is a whole history of writers who have written poems, arguments, research, and outlines that students are, in a sense, responding to. Mark Strand and Eavan Boland express this idea in terms of creative writing when they comment on the temporal dialogue within poetic form in their book The Making of a Poem: “contemporary poets, in completely different circumstances, [bring] new voices to old forms ... The way in which a twentieth century poet like Elizabeth Bishop or Dylan Thomas can rediscover the villanelle ... is proof of how these forms reinscribe themselves” (4).  Writers always need to look to the past for conventional advice while also adding their own thoughts and meanings for new audiences to consume.