What Makes Writing So Important?

Writing is the primary basis upon which your work, your learning, and your
intellect will be judgedin college, in the workplace, and in the community.

Writing expresses who you are as a person.

Writing is portable and permanent. It makes your thinking visible.

Writing helps you move easily among facts, inferences, and opinions without
getting confusedand without confusing your reader.

Writing promotes your ability to pose worthwhile questions.

Writing fosters your ability to explain a complex position to readers, and to

yourself.

Writing helps others give you feedback.

Writing helps you refine your ideas when you give others feedback.

Writing requires that you anticipate your readers needs. Your ability to do so
demonstrates your intellectual flexibility and maturity.

Writing ideas down preserves them so that you can reflect upon them later.

Writing out your ideas permits you to evaluate the adequacy of your argument.

Writing stimulates you to extend a line of thought beyond your first impressions
or gut responses.

Writing helps you understand how truth is established in a given discipline.

Writing equips you with the communication and thinking skills you need to
participate effectively in democracy.

Writing is an essential job skill.

~based upon brochures from Brown University

and the University of Missouri
Home
Make/Cancel an Appointment
Submit a Draft Online
Faculty Resources
Handouts
ESL
About
FAQs
Home Faculty Resources Tips on Teaching Writing What is Good Writing?
 Search this Search

At the Writing Center, were often asked What makes good writing? or What makes
someone a good writer? Instructors wonder whether anyone can really be taught to
write and why their students dont know how to write by now. To begin to understand
what makes writing, and writers, good, we need to ask the larger question What is
writing?

Its easy to agree on the definition of writing if we limit it to something like putting
pen to paper or typing ideas into a computer. But if we look more closely at the
elements of the act of writing, the definition comes to life. The following paragraphs
might prompt your thinking about how writing happens for your students and for you.

Writing is a response.

We write because we are reacting to someone or something. While writing can feel like
an isolating, individual actjust you and the computer or pad of paperit is really a
social act, a way in which we respond to the people and world around us. Writing
happens in specific, often prescribed contexts. We are not just writingwe are always
writing to an audience(s) for some particular purpose. When we write, we do so
because we want, need, or have been required to create a fixed space for someone to
receive and react to our ideas. Understanding this social or rhetorical contextwho our
readers may be, why they want to read our ideas, when and where they will be
reading, how they might view us as writersgoverns some of the choices we make.
The writing context requires writers to have a sense of the readers expectations and
an awareness of conventions for a particular piece of writing. The context of the piece
further determines the appropriate tone, level of vocabulary, kind and placement of
evidence, genre, and sometimes even punctuation.

Writing is linear.

In order to communicate effectively, we need to order our words and ideas on the
page in ways that make sense to a reader. We name this requirement in various ways:
grammar, logic, or flow. While we would all agree that organization is important,
the process of lining up ideas is far from simple and is not always recognized as
writing. We assume that if a person has ideas, putting them on the page is a simple
matter of recording them, when in fact the process is usually more complicated. As
weve all experienced, our ideas do not necessarily arise in a linear form. We may have
a scattering of related ideas, a hunch that something feels true, or some other sense
that an idea is right before we have worked out the details. It is often through the
act of writing that we begin to create the logical relationships that develop the idea
into something that someone else may receive and perhaps find interesting. The
process of putting ideas into words and arranging them for a reader helps us to see,
create, and explore new connections. So not only does a writer need to have ideas,
but the writer also has to put them in linear form, to write them for a reader, in
order for those ideas to be meaningful. As a result, when we are writing, we often try
to immediately fit our choices into linear structures (which may or may not suit our
habits of mind).

Writing is recursive.

As we write, we constantly rewrite. Sometimes we do this unconsciously, as we juggle

words, then choose, delete, and choose again. Sometimes we do this rewriting very
consciously and conscientiously as we reread a paragraph or page for clarity,
coherence, or simply to see what weve just said and decide whether we like it. Having
read, we rewrite the same phrases or ideas to make a closer match to our intentions or
to refine our discoveries through language. The process of writing and then reviewing,
changing, and rewriting is a natural and important part of shaping expression for an
anticipated audience. So while we are trying to put our words and ideas into a logical
line, we are also circling round and back and over again.

Writing is both subject and object.

We value writing because it reveals the personal choices a writer has made and
thereby reveals something of her habits of mind, her ability to connect and shape
ideas, and her ability to transform or change us as readers. We take writing as
evidence of a subject or subjective position. Especially in an academic environment, we
read written language as individual expression (whether or not multiple voices have
informed the one voice we privilege on the page), as a volley from one individual mind
to another. That said, writing also serves as an object for us, a piece or a paper
whose shape, size, and function are determined by genre and conventions. While we
dont think of writing as technology, it is also that; it allows us to remove a persons
ideas from the confines of her head and fix those ideas in another place, a place where
they will be evaluated according to standards, objectively. Here is where our sense of
what counts as good writing develops. We have created objective (although highly
contextualized) ideals for writing that include measures of appropriate voice,
vocabulary, evidence, and arrangement. So while writing is very personal, or
subjective, it creates an objective space, a place apart from the individual, and we
measure it against objective standards derived from the context. It creates space both
for the individual (the subject) and the idea (the object) to coexist so that we can both
judge the merits of the individual voicing the idea and contend with the idea on the
page.

Writing is decision making.

It may seem obvious, but in order to get something on the page, a writer chooses the
words, the order of the words in the sentence, the grouping of sentences into
paragraphs, and the order of the paragraphs within a piece. While there is an
ordinariness about thiswe make choices or decisions almost unconsciously about
many things all day longwith writing, as we have all experienced, such decision-
making can be a complex process, full of discovery, despair, determination, and
deadlines. Making decisions about words and ideas can be a messy, fascinating,
perplexing experience that often results in something mysterious, something the writer
may not be sure works until she has auditioned it for a real reader.

Writing is a process.

Contending with the decision-making, linearity, social context, subjectivity, and

objectivity that constitute writing is a process that takes place over time and through
language. When producing a piece of writing for an audience, experienced writers use
systems they have developed. Each writer has an idiosyncratic combination of
thinking, planning, drafting, and revising that, for him, means writing something. No
matter how an individual describes his process (e.g., First I think about my idea then
dump thoughts onto the computer, or I make an outline then work out topic
sentences), each person (usually unconsciously) negotiates the series of choices
required in his individual context and produces a draft that begins to capture a
representation of his ideas. For most people, this negotiation includes trial and error
(this word or that?), false starts (beginning with an example that later proves
misleading), contradictions (I cant say X because it may throw Y into question),
sorting (how much do I need to say about this?), doubt about how the idea will be
received, and satisfaction when they think they have cleared these hurdles
successfully. For most people, this process happens through language. In other words,
we use words to discover what, how, and why we believe. Research supports the
adage I dont know what I think until I read what Ive said.
Altogether these elements make writing both an interesting and challenging actone
that is rich, complex, and valuable. What else is writing for you? Think about what the
definitions discussed here miss and how you might complete the sentence Writing is
like From your experience as a writer, what else about writing seems essential? How
is that connected to what you value about the process of writing and the final pieces
that you produce?

For more information about student writing or to talk with someone about your writing
assignments, contact Kimberly Abels kabels@email.unc.edu at the Writing Center

Segu https://coursedev.umuc.edu/WRTG999A/chapter1/ch1-01.html

What Is College Writing?

College courses demand many different kinds of writing that employ a variety of strategies for
different audiences. You may be required to write long essays or short answers in response to
examination questions. You may be asked to keep a journal, write a lab report, and document
the process you use to perform research. You may be called upon to create a design document,
write a business report or plan, and report on the results of research. These are only some of
the many types of writing you may engage in throughout your college career.

College writing, also called academic writing, is assigned to teach you the critical thinking and
writing skills needed to communicate in courses and in the workplace. To acquire and practice
these skills, you are asked to write many different types of assignments under different
circumstances. Sometimes your instructor will assign a topic and define the audience;
sometimes you will have to define and limit the topic and audience yourself. In any case,
college writing teaches you about the series of decisions you must make as you forge the link
between your information and your audience.

For example, you must decide what sources of information you will use, how you will interpret
this information, how you will organize your ideas, and what words and strategies you will use
to explain your ideas. Your college writing experience will teach you about the writing process
and about writing for particular disciplines, such as those in the liberal arts and business
management specializations. College writing offers you the opportunity to learn many different
strategies for approaching writing tasks so that you may communicate how much you know
and understand about a subject to a particular audience, usually your classmates or your
instructor.

The expository nature of college writing, with its emphasis on the knowledge you gain in your
college courses and through research, makes such writing different from your previous writing
and perhaps more challenging. Instructors may expect your essays to contain more research,
show more awareness of differing points of view, and even reflect more sophisticated
expository techniques, such as argument and persuasion. The main sources of the content of
your college writing will be assigned textbook readings, library books and articles, your
experience, and even field studies you might have designed. You will often use the skills you
learn in college writing throughout your career.

What Is Writing?

Johannah Rodgers

mimeograph

0 Reviews

A brief introduction to writing as an act of communication that explains how and why writing is never just one
different things that fall into three broad categories: writing as an action, writing as a process, and writing as a
understanding the many aspects of what writing is and the basic elements that constitute it, this book enables r
means of communication and how the various elements of writing interact and relate to one another every time
not for profit publisher dedicated to supporting innovative digital projects related to art, critical literacy educat

More

What people are saying - Write a review

We haven't found any reviews in the usual places.

Bibliographic information
Title What Is Writing?

Author Johannah Rodgers

Publisher mimeograph

ISBN 1610614534, 9781610614535

What is Writing?: Student Practices and Perspectives on the Technologies of Literacy in College Composi

Sarah Catherine Spring

Texas A & M University, 2011

0 Reviews

Despite the increasing presence of technology in composition classrooms, students have not yet accepted the idea of m
not yet fully understand the role of the word processor in their individual writing process. The research goal of this diss
of writing, both in and outside of a computer composition classroom, from students' perspective by investigating their
relationship between writing and technology. To highlight student writing practices, the analysis uses both qualitative
lab at Texas A & M University, one freshman composition and one advanced composition course. Several important pa
each of the main chapters focuses on a different student perspective. Chapter II argues that students tend to view com
that affects how they perceive and work with classroom computers. Because how they perceive and approach comput
theories of writing and technology. The discussion postings indicate that students write differently at home than they d
bound theories. They are more familiar with the personal context, often exhibiting an inability to translate their ease w
academic environment. Their makeshift theories lead to writing practices, and Chapter IV examines student responses
discomfort with academic writing leads them to compose with a computer because they believe technology makes thi
medium can actually derail writing when made for reasons of ease or convenience. This study finds that physical set-up
have perpetuated these problems. Despite these obstacles, a computer classroom approach has unique advantages, a
developing rhetorical flexibility or the ability of students to produce multiple texts in multiple contexts.

More

What people are saying - Write a review

We haven't found any reviews in the usual places.

Bibliographic information
Title What is Writing?: Student Practices and Perspectives on the Technologies of Literacy
in College Composition

Author Sarah Catherine Spring

Publisher Texas A & M University, 2011