Brian Schiff

3 December 2014
Self-Assessment

Might Makes Write

It is difficult to teach a student to be a better writer. Throughout high school, many

students tend to develop habits in their writing processes that can severely hold them back and
make learning difficult for themselves. Unfortunately, learning is just the beginning. A student
can read pages out of a textbook and memorize definitions word for word. However, there tends
to be a disconnect where there is a failure in the application of concepts that are learned. I
experienced this firsthand coming into my first college English course. I read many passages
from the Writing About Writing Book by Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs and wrote
numerous reading responses. Each covered a broad array of topics from literary sponsors, to
discourse communities, to rhetoric, and writing processes. I struggled at first just to remember
the vocabulary but persistence yielded results. I began looking at literature and how I wrote
differently. That is where I began to experience disconnects. What I mean is that there is a
difference between learning and application. A student can learn numerous formulas in a math
class and insert numbers into them like a mindless monkey but when someone tells them to
manipulate the equation in a slightly different way, it is like throwing a wrench into the machine.
It took me time to apply what I had learned in my own order develop the mastery that I sought.
Fortunately for me, I was given many opportunities to practice what I had learned. I had many
different essays to look back at what I had learned a second time and apply them in different
contexts.
Coming into the class, I had the typical mindset for an incoming college freshman. Any

essay including research papers that I had written were of the same five paragraph construct in
which I would write a thesis and gather only three points of supporting evidence. In addition,
there was major handholding on the part of the teacher where I would receive so much assistance
that the paper was barely my own work. The first research paper I wrote for my first college
English class felt like ice water had just been thrown into my face. I had far more substantial
time constraints and a much higher word limit. I also had to avoid writing in the typical five
paragraph construct that I was used to. For my paper named The AMSA Opportunity, I wrote a
research paper about Premed-AMSA using John Swales characteristics of discourse communities
as a critical lens. For my paper, I wrote my paper in an IMRAD model where I had an
introduction where I addressed previous research, established my niche, and made a claim. In my
methods section, I talked about how I found my data. As part of my research I visited the UCF
AMSA website, watched the first general meeting, and sent emails to the vice president and
sergeant at arms of the organization. In my research/results section, I wrote about what I found
in my endeavors. As I gathered information I was able to observe their mechanisms of feedback
and information, their genres, their set of common public goals, and their methods of
intercommunication. Each of these observations played important roles in supporting my claim.
However, throughout my writing process, I found myself struggling with purpose and
audience. As I had read previously in Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents by Keith
Grant-Davie a rhetorical situation is an event where a rhetor attempts to get people to do
something. A rhetor communicates their purpose to an audience in order to persuade them into
action. In my case, I was having trouble figuring out who my audience was. Each time I
reconsidered my audience, it almost entirely changed my claim. Almost every time I looked at
my outline, I would come up with new ideas. Once I had finally recognized the appropriate

audience of my fellow pre-meds, I was able to solidify a claim. The process of incorporating
what I had previously learned in writing my essay, I gained an understanding of rhetoric.
For this class, it was required to develop the ability to read the complex texts within the
Writing About Writing book in order to write reading responses. Before coming to this class, my
reading strategy was to read the assigned text twice, from beginning to end. I would not write
notes or annotate anywhere in the book or on paper. Of course, this began to become a problem
as when I wanted to find specific quotes I had significant difficulty finding them. Also, if I
thought of any ideas for my response while I was reading, I would lose them by the time I
finished reading. This would make the planning process more difficult for me. The decision I
came to in order to overcome my initial problems was to skim the readings. I knew what
skimming was and how it could be utilized on passages from certain textbooks. I used this
strategy but built upon it by looking for bolded words, ignoring long quotes, and reading
subheadings. After writing numerous reading responses, I became proficient at reading complex
texts.
Previously, I was unaware of my writing experience. It had only occurred to me after
reading In Revisualizing Composition by Jeff Grabill that writing can come in many different
forms. They can come in the form of emails, text messages, lecture notes, and status message
updates (728). For my third essay titled My Blog Process, I observed how my own writing
process changed based on context. When I wrote five paragraph essays in school, my writing
strategy was very straightforward. I would make a brainstorm complete with little diagrams that
connected with each other similar to what I did in my reading response of Rhetorical Situations
and Their Constituents by Keith Grant-Davie. I would then write an outline complete with
headings and subheadings for each paragraph. For this paper, I build upon what I had done in my

previous essay and wrote in the IMRAD model. The blog that I wrote was for an article in the
Writing About Writing book named Late Nights, Last Rites, and the Rain-Slock Road to SelfDestruction by Thomas Osborne. In this context I noticed that I did not write a brainstorm or an
outline even though I spent a significant amount of my time planning. My writing process unlike
most of the papers I write in that I had no time or word constraints except for the ones that I set
for myself. These constraints manifested themselves as writers block as I wrote and edited my
blog. This writers block results in some procrastination which tends to be consistent in my
writing processes in almost every genre I write in.
In this class, I was glad that I not only learned the concepts but I also got the opportunity
to apply each of them within different writing contexts. The ways I look at texts, the ways I plan,
and the ways I write have been changed because of what I have learned. My newfound
knowledge of discourse communities, writing processes across different genres, and observing
complex texts will most likely help me in my future writing endeavors.