The Writing Program

When we think of writing as composing, we are thinking of process. We are thinking of the act of writing rather than the finished product. The process of composing is the process of putting things together to make a harmonious whole: composing a piece of music, composing a piece of art, composing a piece of writing. The writing process itself is composed of many steps, such as reading, prewriting, outlining, drafting, reviewing, revising, editing, and reflecting. These steps are iterative and cyclical. There is no one right process that will serve all writers in all situations. It is, however, certain that good writing is rewriting. A first draft rarely serves as a good final draft. It takes time to develop and articulate one’s ideas; a robust writing process ensures your thinking will evolve as you revise your writing. Deep knowledge of writing processes is especially important when entering internships, jobs, and other contexts where one needs to write in new genres for a wide range of audiences and working to produce high-quality documents.

Students who are developing their awareness of writing process

• Use active reading strategies to join in textual conversations, increase comprehension and generate ideas
• Work through multiple drafts to deepen the textual conversations they are engaging, to develop their understanding and articulation of ideas, and to anticipate and respond to readers’ needs.
• Experiment with, assess, and revise their writing process(es) in response to different writing situations (e.g., collaborative writing processes, multimodal writing, writing for professional versus public audiences)
• Seek feedback to understand readers’ experience with their text.
• Revise in response to feedback and their own assessment of the draft, to reconsider the aims and effects of prior drafts, and to think globally about purpose, logic, organization, claims and evidence, integration of others’ words and ideas, and genre conventions.
• Edit rigorously for sentence-level precision, nuance, and formal conventions.

Rhetorical knowledge entails being flexible when faced with a writing task. Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric is a useful place to start when considering how we can become rhetorically flexible.  According to many translations, Aristotle defined rhetoric as the art of discovering the available means of persuasion for the given situation.  Although rhetoric has also been translated as the power of discoveringwhat it takes to write a persuasive text. Taken together, both translations suggest that, as rhetors, we engage in a powerful, creative act no matter what kind of writing we do. This act hinges on a series of interconnected questions about our rhetorical choices that place us in a relationship to our audience within certain social contexts.  Kenneth Burke, a contemporary rhetorician who re-envisioned Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric, emphasizes the relational nature of our texts when he says persuasion happens through identification. In other words, writers who seek to persuade an audience do so by actively identifying with the beliefs and values of that audience through their choices about purpose, genre, evidence, and style as they seek common ground with a range of stakeholders.

Students who are developing their awareness of rhetoric:

• Raise questions about the social context within which a text will circulate
• Determine who the stakeholders are beyond the target or intended audience
• Identify their exigence for writing a text
• Consider how various purposes and appeals might satisfy that exigence
• Make informed judgements about choices of genre, evidence, and style

In conventional usage, the term genre describes different types in a larger category. For example, in the larger category of film, different types include action, horror, and romantic-comedy. In the larger category of writing, different genres include fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. However, a broader understanding of Genre knowledge expands the conventional use of genre to include all repeated forms of spoken and written communication that have developed over time through repeated use. Typical examples include everyday genres such as reports, grants, articles, press releases, proposals, lab reports, and legal briefs. Such forms evolve over time as people adapt them for new purposes and situations. As such, genres are forms of social practice that play an important role in the shaping of community values and beliefs, as well as cultural spaces that enact and reproduce different social relations, identities, and power dynamics. Genres guide and shape our interactions with each other, while providing templates for enacting agency in a diverse and multicultural world.

Students who are developing their awareness of genre:

• Recognize when a particular genre is in use
• Describe the formal features of a genre of writing and how it tries to address a specific audience
• Apply knowledge of specific genres to effectively compose and write for specific audiences both individually and collaboratively
• Reproduce or modify a genre to fit the rhetorical needs of specific situations
• Are aware of the ways genres shape identity and social relations

Who we are–including what and how we know, value, believe, and do–shapes and is shaped by how we communicate within and across particular communities. As writers, but also as family members, neighbors, colleagues, and citizens, how we communicate helps to determine what it means to belong within particular communities, who gets to belong, and to what extent. Belonging in a community can be a beautiful, powerful thing, and with that power comes access to resources and opportunities. After all, that’s what college is all about, isn’t it: gaining access to a particular community and its attendant resources and opportunities? However, as is all too often the case, communities can be unnecessarily exclusive, and the ways that they value or devalue particular forms of communication–whether intentionally or not–exclusionary. Discourse community knowledge helps us recognize this relationship between community identity and writing so that we can more critically and equitably shape what it means to belong.

Students who are developing their awareness of discourse communities:

• Study others’ writing not just as evidence of a skillset but as discourse, or what linguist James Paul Gee calls an identity kit, i.e. how we know, value, believe, and do in ways that determine who we are and where we belong.
• Scrutinize why particular ways of writing (including genre conventions, writing processes, and rhetorical situations) and languaging (including language varieties, dialects, and registers) are privileged by particular groups of people in particular situations (i.e. discourse communities)
• Make informed decisions about adhering to and upholding particular writing and language values and practices with the aim of contributing to a more just and equitable world.

Metacognition is sometimes defined as thinking about your thinking. While it might sound like an act of mental gymnastics, metacognition is a critical element in learning and acquiring new skills. Just as active reading strategies can deepen your understanding of whatever it is you are reading, metacognition (which we might also call active thinking) is the process of reflecting  on what you  learn, how you learn, and how this learning might transfer to other contexts. As writers, this awareness applies to your writing choices: metacognition means that you know what you are doing when you write and why you are doing it. The primary goal of all learning is transformation--that you leave a learning experience (such as a writing class) with new understandings and competencies. Metacognition is the foundation of  this transformation because it means you are more cognizant of your writing choices. That is to say, the more you can articulate the techniques and process(es) you’ve used and the rhetorical concepts you’ve applied to your writing, the more you will grow as a writer capable of facing new writing situations.

Students who are developing their awareness of metacognition:

• Connect specific writing choices with awareness of audience, purpose, and rhetorical situation
• Plan revision strategies in response to feedback from other readers and  from an  awareness of previous successes and challenges in other writing situations.
• Reflect on prior writing experiences (previous genres, rhetorical situations, and discourse communities) to consider similarities and differences to your current writing situation
• Anticipate how the writing concepts and strategies used in one context might be transferred to future writing situations
• Practice ongoing self-evaluation of writing processes and products, and how they are both structured by individual and cultural processes and systems