Writing is a practice that involves a multi-stage, recursive and social process.

In the beginning of the semester, I admit I did not do any revisions on my work because I was a believer in my first try is my best effort. Throughout the course, I began to realize that different ideas can pop into my head at any point and they could make some pretty good revisions. It is really a multi step process that needs to be executed. Especially because of Professor Hodge’s over willingness to give feedback on the students’ work. A great example of me taking the feedback from Professor is after the first conference we had about the final 3,000 word paper. In this conference, we changed the meaning of my thesis, without actually changing my thesis. We sat down and really narrowed my thesis into something worth writing about. During the conversation, we made it clear that the focus should be why people should be doing physical activity, not what is physical activity. It was a very interesting conversation that provoked many different and new thoughts into my head. This allowed for what I believe is a pretty solid paper, that never would have been without the consistent feedback throughout the stages of it’s creation process.

Close and critical reading/analysis is necessary for listening to and questioning texts, arriving at a thoughtful understanding of those texts, and joining the academic and/or public conversations represented by those texts.

The first thing that I learned in this course is that all text is argument. Early on in the course it was stressed to really read the meaning behind the words in everything we can read. It was really challenging for me in the beginning of the semester, but with practice during class, it became much easier and a lot of fun. It has become easier to understand what the author is saying, but have the ability to say what you got out of the author’s writing. A personal favorite activity that we did in class was moving certain words around in each sentence. For example, “Only she said she loved him.” was the phrase and as a class, we moved around the word “only” and saw how the meaning of the sentence was changing.

Writing is shaped by audience, purpose, and context.

This is a very interesting part of the class. We were able to learn what the purpose of writing a meaningful paper was. Our audience is the concise 2% of people who do not know anything, or do not have an opinion about our topic. It was stressed that we are not trying to make people believe in our idea more, or persuade people into believing us as writers, even though that would be nice. We are trying to inform the blind and have them believe in what we have to say. In a way, the author can be an influence on the audience. If we tried to only write to the people who disbelieve in what we have to say as authors, then we would have no audience. The purpose of writing is to persuade. As writers, we are giving the readers information for them to either agree or disagree with what we have to say as writers. 

Information literacy is essential to the practice of writing.

Writing is a very long process. It is a process that starts with a lot of background research. It is very important to be able to do research well. Finding public, academic, and disciplinary information in a digital environment is a very tricky thing to do due to all of the information on the internet nowadays. We need the write background information on the writer to determine if the source we have selected is a valuable and useful source. Through my annotated bibliography, I learned a great deal of information about my topic. Reading the 10 sources and finding the meaning behind the text was crucial for me to produce the work I did. 

Writing has power and comes with ethical responsibilities.

Writing is something an author should be able to take pride in. The feeling of actually accomplishing work that is meaningful and puts good in the world is one like no other. The problem appears when the writing is published. People have a tendency to take and use from other people’s works. This is an acceptable practice when the usage of proper citation is present. This is not a form of ethical writing though. Ethical writing is not changing the words to make it sound like your own. It includes the other author’s ideas and use them in your own voice. Through proper reading and annotating, you can make a really good paper on anything you want, ethically.