Jada Jordan-DaSilva 

5/20/2020 

English 110 

Theory of Writing 

 

What is writing? I know that by definition writing is “the activity or skill of marking coherent words on paper and composing text.” but when you conceptualize it, it becomes so much more. I know that writing is expressive, it’s a sentence that brings your thoughts to life. Writing is a feeling, it’s something that takes your blank sheet of paper and turns it into something more. Writing allows you to make your dreams a tangible reality and allows your untold stories to come to life. I know that writing is something that allows you to take the world around you and turn it into words. Not only can it do that, but writing can change who you are, the people around you and, it can change the world.  

Throughout my academic career my writing has evolved tremendously. Obviously when I first started writing essays, they were far from perfect. I had tons of run on sentences and minimal punctuation. I was always told that I write like how I talk: superfast and without pausing, but once I got those bad grades, I started changing the way I write. As I got older and went throughout school, I always had a really hard time writing essays. Whenever one would be assigned, I would dread it, simply because I knew whatever I was going to write wasn’t going to make sense. I had a very hard time taking my thoughts and organizing them cohesively into an essay but, once I hit junior year this all changed. I took AP Language and Comprehension during my junior year and my teacher was always very adamant about us writing everything. She assigned us timed in class essays almost every week and when we had to write longer essays, she made us write out our rough drafts and then type our papers. This really helped my writing because I realized that when I wrote things down, I wasn’t worried about how they looked or how it sounded I just wrote what I thought was correct. She also introduced us to breaking down the questions and answering every single part of it. This not only helped me to answer the question fully, but it also helped me avoid writing anything that didn’t have to do with question.  

Once coming to college this class specifically really helped me improve upon my writing skills. When I first signed up, I thought that it was going to be nothing more than just another college English class. I was expecting a lot of long and meaningless essays but, I was surprised to get the exact opposite. While being in this class we have written multiple different types of papers which is normal but, what makes this class different is the reflective process. Throughout the semester we were constantly asked to reflect on not only our writing but our peers. While doing this it really helped me understand what my strengths are as a writer and what my areas of opportunity were. We’ve been given time to really look at and understand the reason behind doing all of our assignments. We were asked to look at our purpose for writing, the message we wanted to convey, and we looked at why we were even doing the assignment but once again understanding the importance of not only our work but the work of others I think that understanding the purpose and knowing what my message is has really helped contribute to my theory of writing by helping me genuinely understand why I was doing what I was doing. I know that sometimes the message that I’m trying to convey gets lost in translation or I go off topic and forget why I’m even writing in the first place. But having those two things already in my head really helps me stay on track with my writing.  

This theory can be applied to all points of life because if you don’t have a purpose for writing then you shouldn’t be doing it. Even if that purpose is just to write for fun if there is no guiding force behind you writing something then it is a waste of time. In my opinion knowing your purpose allows for a nice rhythm to your paper and it also allows you to get your message across clearly and concisely. Writing is something that I found quite difficult but with the help of my past teachers and this class it has become something that I don’t find as difficult anymore