My theory of writing is that with a clear outline, revision, and peer review a basic piece of writing can become excellent. With a clear outline, you will be able to map out what you want to write and gather your thoughts before you actually write the paper. After writing the paper you should review and reflect on what you wrote and how you can improve it. Doing this multiple times will improve your writing by helping you reword sentences to make it, fixing grammatical issues, and adding any additional information if needed. Peer review is also very helpful to your writing because it brings another perspective to it. This can help you change your writing to fit a certain perspective. Peer reviewing also can be useful for grammatically checking the writing.
Coming into this class my writing was very below average. I did not put much thought into my writing and just focused on finishing the task. My theory of writing was just to finish the task and to make sure my grammar was correct. Although making sure my grammar was correct is important to writing, I never checked to see if my sentences were phrased correctly or if they made sense. Through peer reviewing and self revising I was able to edit my writing so that the sentences were clear and concise. Peer review was especially helpful in the group project, innovation proposal since my group members helped me review my part of the assignment. Also, I would never manage my time when doing an assignment which made it difficult to get it done efficiently. The technical description assignment taught me to create an outline before writing anything since it will help organize my thoughts. This made it easier to manage my time since I was able to think of what to write before I actually wrote it.
I have developed my theory of writing by implementing things like tone, language, genre, audience, and purpose into my writing. When revising my writings I made sure that the tone was set to what the task asked for. For example in my Rhetorical analysis, I had to use a professional and informative tone because it was reviewing a professional lab report. To set the correct tone I had to use the correct language based on the genre of writing as well. In my very first writing assignment for this class, I had to write a letter to the teacher about myself. So for this assignment, I used words that are more formal since I am writing to my professor but I was more casual in writing it because I was telling her more about myself and what I want to do in the future. For the technical description assignment, I used a descriptive and informative tone because I was describing the parts of a skateboard and their functions. I also did the same when writing the innovation proposal since I had to describe an innovation I wanted to make. The audience and purpose also matter a lot when you write something because you need to write in a certain way to appeal to the audience. In the rhetorical analysis, the audience is people who are interested in reading a lab report and the purpose is to inform them if this lab report follows the basic structure of a lab report and if it’s worth reading. The audience in my technical description are people who want to learn about how a skateboard is made, and the audience for the innovation proposal are people who want to learn about possible solutions to electronic noise.
Through this course, I learned to locate research resources in the CCNY library database when doing my rhetorical analysis. I also referred to many other sites in my technical description assignment which helped me gain information on my topic. I used the different websites and articles by paraphrasing and quoting from the text. When I used these sources I had to cite them because they need to receive their credit for their work. This was very important because it would help me avoid plagiarism in my assignments.
This course has changed my theory of writing from when I first started this class because it helped me develop my writing to make it better. I learned to make a clear outline of what I want to write, self-review my writing to fix and edit my writing, and have a peer look through my writing to give me another perspective of the writing. I also learned that the tone and language of my writing should reflect what my audience is. Also learning to use the CCNY database was very useful since I can use it in my future classes when I need to find credible articles for assignments. Giving credit to these articles is very important since it’s their work and not mine, I’m only using their work to support my claims. My writing has come a long way since starting this class and has improved tremendously.
