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My Writer's Identity: The Chicken or the Egg
What are the most important writing studies concepts that you explored while taking English 2040? Why are those concepts important to you as a writer and/or writing studies student?
One of the concepts that resonated the most to me throughout this semester was that Writers Always Have More to Learn. I found a lot of comfort through reading from experts about how this is a normal and constant aspect of being a writer. I don't always feel the most confident in my skills, but I feel like I've grown this semester and I'm proud of the progress I've made. I'm much more content now with the understanding that I will always be a work-in-progress which allows me to push through spells of writer's block, which usually stem from my being too much of a perfectionist. I truly feel that if you can move past that self-consciousness, and just let your passion drive your work, you will always end up with positive results because any writing you do and risks you take can only help you learn and grow. So don't hold back!
I also felt like the research I did this semester on student protest writing reaffirmed a lot of the concepts covered in: Writing Enacts and Creates Identities and Ideologies. I felt like I was learning more about myself as a writer this semester in conjunction with deepening my appreciation of social justice work. I have been trying to become a more active proponent for positive change, and I feel like researching and writing about the history of various protest movements and interviewing current activists allowed me to do just that. I experienced firsthand how writing can help develop identity, but I also found several other examples through my research. Specifically, in Springsteen, Spoken Word, and Social Justice: Engaging Students in Activism through Songs and Poetry, Jaclyn Burr explains how the benefit of incorporating songs and poetry in the classroom exposes students to different cultures and backgrounds, "helping them to connect with other peoples' stories and increasing their sense of empathy." Because topics like, "discrimination, poverty, privilege, oppression, mental illness, education, incarceration, violence, stereotypes, environmental degradation, and identity are widespread throughout spoken word poetry and songs, just as they are found in many different communities and student Identities."
In general, reading and writing allows us to better understand the issues facing our communities and develop identities as more empathetic, socially conscious people. I was able to reap these benefits personally through the research project I conducted this semester which helped me further develop my own identity as a writer and social activist. My identity led into my desire to research this topic and conversely, deepened my understanding of and ideologies behind that identity. I've been a writer since I was able to write, and I like to think that my identity as a writer relates to the chicken and the egg conundrum with this theory of identity creation. I am who I am because I write and the writing I do is shaped by who I am. I take comfort in knowing that I have the ability to shape the person I become by focusing my writing on the topics that give my life purpose, like social justice. By assuming a role of a forever student who always has more to learn and who is capable of shaping their own identity through writing, I can use writing studies to become the person I want to be.
What texts have you included in your portfolio? What does each text demonstrate about your development as a writing studies student and your progress toward achieving the learning outcomes for the course?
The portfolio below is comprised of several writing assignments from throughout this semester. I have included my midterm reflection about my identity as a writer, the research project I wrote for this class and presented at this year's UP3RC conference, the poster presentation that I created in conjunction with the research project, and two discussions I was especially interested in. Each of these texts demonstrates my understanding of the concepts we studied this semester--allowing me to recognize the threshold concepts of writing studies and put them into practice from conducting multi-source research into a specialized area (I chose 3 methods of primary research instead of just 1), to analyzing various roles of writing and writing education in higher education systems (the thesis of my research project was centered on the educational value of protest), to presenting research to effectively share your knowledge with others (which I did via undergraduate research conference).
How have you applied your learning about writing studies to your own work as a writer?
I am proud of the work I have accomplished this semester and can already see how it has contributed to my writing in a variety of contexts. I often do research about different community organizations and best practices for my work at the women's resource center and now feel more confident in my ability to effectively learn about and communicate my findings with others. I write the newsletter for our facility and have been able to directly apply several of these lessons outside of school, which has allowed me to feel more empowered in my professional pursuits and personal writing.
Sep 19 5:18pm| Last reply Sep 19 11:13pm
Manage Discussion by Molly Hedgepeth
Reply from Molly Hedgepeth
Reply from Molly Hedgepeth
My desire to write started from a young age because my grandmother was a writer, and I aspired to be like her. I used to write little stories and poems and immediately rush to her room to have her proofread them for me. I was usually writing with her approval in mind and in that way, writing was always a social practice for me. Even as I got older, I would often write letters to others in order to better conceptualize my feelings and learn to express them. Whether I ever sent the letters (which was often not the case) the writing itself was always social because I had that audience in mind. The majority of the writing I do now is for school or work, and I am always striving to improve my clarity and accurately express my thoughts to others.
I found some solace while reading the section about "writing not being natural". Because a lot of the writing I do for work is communicating important changes in policies and procedures, it's vital that the meaning behind my words is effectively communicated, but that isn't always easy. Realizing that writing is a relatively new technology in the grand scheme of things, actually gives me a little more peace of mind because, "-writers tend to judge their writing processes too harshly--comparing them to the ease with which they usually speak. Speech, however, employs an extensive array of modalities unavailable to writing: gesture, expression, pacing, register, silences, and clarifications-(pg. 29)." Understanding the limits of writing allows me to give myself a little more grace (which is beneficial on a personal level for my own sanity) while also developing different ways to work around those limits (which benefits everyone). I've started adding as many pictures as possible to the weekly bulletins I send out, for example, because some things are best expressed through visuals.
The threshold concept of "Words get their meaning from other words" also resonated with me because most of my vocabulary has been built through deciphering meaning via context clues. It's not as if I often find myself browsing through a dictionary for fun. I remember, especially when taking literacy tests in grade school, getting really good at guessing the general meaning of words based on the context. I appreciated how this section points out that meaning is actually much more contingent on context than practically anything else. Any one word can have several definitions depending on the scenario-like the example they gave of cup either meaning a drinking vessel or a sports trophy. I used to think that it was lazy of me to guess the meaning of a word through context rather than taking the time to look up the specific definition, and although I still see a lot of value in doing that, I now realize that the skill of decoding context is an essential step of creating meaning when we read.
Discussion questions: What are some examples from your own life where a word's meaning changes depending on the context or medium of writing? Do you have any words or phrases that have a specific meaning to just you or a friend/family member? How does this change in meaning alter your understanding of writing as a technology for communication?
Oct 26 9:45pm| Last reply Oct 26 11:34pm
Manage Discussion by Molly Hedgepeth
Reply from Molly Hedgepeth
Reply from Molly Hedgepeth
Part 1: Reflecting on Threshold Concept 5
This chapter left me feeling a bit intimidated in that, it has led me to question some of my understanding of how to become a good writer and opened my eyes to the depth of work I still have to do in order to become one. I've always thought of myself as a fairly strong writer, but I think section 5.3 by Chris M Anson, "Habituated Practice Can Lead to Entrenchment" has further humbled me. He points out that, "when writers are subjected to repeated practice of the same genres, using the same processes for the same rhetorical purposes and addressing the same audiences, their conceptual framework for writing may become entrenched (pg. 77)." I always thought that "practice makes perfect", which I guess is still true if you are only ever writing in one specific field or context, but what truly differentiates a decent writer from a truly talented one is being able to adapt to a diverse range of writing methods and not get to stuck in one specific method of learning and regurgitating information. When I was younger, the 5-paragraph essay sort of became my forte, even though I can't say I enjoyed it much. I remember my teacher hanging the essays that got perfect scores up on the back wall of her classroom and I would beat myself up for days if my paper didn't make it on "the wall of fame" for the week. The pride I felt when I saw my paper standing out as an example for the rest of my classmates was something that buoyed my confidence as a writer for a long time so, I felt pretty called out when Anson wrote later on in his essay, "In writing the misapplication of habituated practices often occurs among novice writers, such as those who are trained throughout high school to write five-paragraph-style essays for standardized tests." Just because I learned a certain skill-set that got me good grades in high school, really doesn't mean those good grades are a reflection of truly inspired/inspirational writing. I'm realizing that my writing practices need to be more diverse if I am going to reach the level of expertise that I aspire to.
Part 2: Reflect on Experiences with College Writing
My college experience has been fairly non-linear since I started by only taking a couple classes that interested me without any real plan and ended up getting a majority of my electives done before my required courses. In retrospect, I wonder if my learning would've benefited from starting out with some of those more foundational courses that required more writing. Still, I identified deeply when reading, "Free to set their own intellectual agendas, many freshmen who grew up in relatively homogeneous communities, set of to explore their identities by selecting courses that enable them, however covertly, to study themselves." The classes I took at the start of my college career are definitely a reflection of who I wanted to be, and while a lot of the writing is sort of painful/embarrassing to read through now (I've had to reflect on a lot of the key assignments from those courses now that I am in the Honors program and my ePortfolio is an important requirement), I can still see how my passion for the subjects pushed me to look for real-world applications, i.e. working for Volunteers of America after taking a Community Engaged Learning course, which is an example of the follow-up thought to the quote I highlighted earlier, "It is most frequently in these courses that novices discover they can "give and get" something through writing (pg.19)."
Question for Discussion:
Have you recognized any negative effects of entrenched writing in your own transition from high school to college writing? If so, how did you overcome it?
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