Low stakes assignments are beneficial in writing, and a type of low stake writing that

would be very helpful to me is a freewrite. Freewrites allows a person to explore their thinking
nonstop and only focus on the actual writing and not correctness (Lunsford 40). I feel this type of
writing allows me the opportunity to write my thoughts down and not worry about the grade I
may get because it won’t be graded. A task that is necessary to read critically is annotating
because it allows you to breakdown the text and brings out key ideas that could help you.
Annotating is critical for high-stakes writing because you can grasp the meanings of the texts and
its' purpose (Lunsford 42). Furthermore, annotating allows you to get a deeper understanding and
interest and possibly the authors' intentions when they were writing, and prepare you for
analyzing.
Writing can work in different ways for each person, and growth is a major key to writing
because there will always be room to improve. I currently believe that writing gives a person an
opportunity to let your imagination run wild, express opinions, ideas, and research. Also, it's a
way to improve daily aspects of your life, such as communication skills. Also, it can help you
find your strengths to grow every time you write. My beliefs on writing come from many years
of English class that I have taken and how important writing is and the type of writing
assignments I had to do. The amount of time that we have been learning, I have learned a few
things from the readings. Some things that I learned, which I never knew about, was discourse
communities. I didn't know or ever heard of that before, but now I know. I know that the basic
definition of a discourse community is that they have the idea of language in common as a basis
for sharing, including their expectations, expressions, and shared participation (John 499). Also,
I learned some critical things for when I do low and high-stake writings and the possible
questions you can ask throughout the process from previewing to analyzing.
Complications that are outlined in John's "Discourse Communities" related to joining a
discourse community is the strength of a specific community may become weaker or stronger
based on circumstances, the participation of the individuals that are a part of it. Especially, the
amount of time that is put into a specific community varies based on one's interest if they join
multiple discourse communities, they could invest their time into a different one which could
affect how well a community works. Furthermore, another complication that is related to joining
a discourse community is that trying to join, learning to write, and have the interests of a new
community could impact your values, feelings, and identity. It is stated that "in some cases
people are excluded from communities because they lack social standing, talent, or money"(John
511 ). Also, it definitely may be somewhat tricky and complicated to join a new community
without knowing the culture that well and what it entails. It's just like when learning a new
subject, you may have the background knowledge to take a pretest but not a test that gets you a
degree in that subject, such as biology, but you could with time and hard work and being active
in that community of biology. To be a part of a new discourse community will make you have
many feelings at first and think about all that you know about that specific community. Another
major complication is the clashing of powers, opinions, sacrifices, and approaches to specific
topics can affect the joining of a discourse community (John, 511). These complications can
affect how one may feel on certain discourse communities and how they feel on joining or when
they first join.