When it comes to writing, we all have our struggles and challenges. Writing about yourself, however, brings along another set of hurdles to maneuver through. Having been born and raised in Haiti, though having an English professor as a parent, my use of English was limited since I never pictured myself living in another country. The transition from French to English was intense as the languages don’t share a common root and that I was thrust into the academic system right away with no real preparation as I was tested and graded upon on equal terms as a native speaker. Now, as an adult, I can look back at the experience and feel pride in how far my skills in the language have improved. I even consider English as my primary language as French takes a back seat in my day-to-day use. Though I have improved a lot, that doesn’t make writing a walk in the park. There is an arduous mental and physical process to get from a body at rest into a writing mood. For many, and often time myself, the motivation comes from the time crunch. Looking at the clock thinking whether I should get up and write or lie in bed for another hour as the hours tick ever so closer to midnight. For the past few years, much like Pavlov and his dog, I have trained myself to motivate myself or at least get into a writing flow by skimpy sitting in front of my computer and playing lofi hip hop on youtube. I don’t know the science behind it but here I find myself listening to a simple melody with no lyrics as I type this paper.
When it comes to writing, I’ve always kept the mentality that all you have to do is write. Much like talking, as long as you can ramble on about a topic you will eventually find footing, you will find your stride. Writing can be done as such but with rules, structure, and a plan writing can be a much easier process and that dread feeling before starting to write also gets easier. Context, exigence, pathos, ethos, audience, rhetorical anything were the furthest things on my mind as I started to tackle a paper. That could be why my body paragraphs always feel and look more robust than my intro or conclusion paragraphs. As I write the body I already have a plan, while for the intro I’m stumbling around the topic, and as for the conclusion, I’ve exhausted all that I had to say in the rest of the paper. With the rhetorical knowledge gained from this class having a mental setup before even writing a word shows to me my evolution as a writer. This class has taught me a lot when it comes to writing and even reading as I developed the skills to read, analyze and write a proper paper.
When it comes to writing, the notion of drafting or having someone review your work was a foreign concept to me. It’s not like I had never done it or had pride in what I wrote, simply that once I was finished with the work, I was… finished. We focused a lot on group work and reviewing our classmates’ works in class and I was able to properly formulate a thought about reviewing and drafting papers. As I went through my classmates’ papers, they caused me to realize that I should “try to open up my mind to different aspects of the questions posed to me and how complex the question can truly be”(Jean-Charles, 2). When reading a prompt, I never had many ideas of what to write. Following the prompt was basically my goal when writing a paper, which generally speaking isn’t bad but causes the paper to sound robotic or bland. However, as I read many different papers about the same topic and following the same prompt I could recognize where my paper was lacking and the way having a unique take on the prompt can make someone’s paper more intriguing. Now I try to sit down and evaluate the different possibilities of not only what I can write about but also how I can write about it within the limitations of the prompt.
When it comes to writing, long writing assignments are not for me. Give me two separate three-page papers any day but once I have to write a six-page paper I get flustered. What do I write? How can I get that many pages? How many more pages? I get paralyzed by the thought of writing and once I feel done there are still more pages needed to be written. The third paper for this class, a research assignment, a kind of paper that I learned to fear throughout my scholastic career. This time around I did not have my usual spiral of dread because we took the essay process apart and worked on it part by part, day by day. Learning how to research and find sources properly, using rhetorical precis to formulate the context, support, purpose, and audience of the works I planned on using, and finally to bundle up everything learning how to synthesize the precis together to support each other and elevate their claim. Using this process, I worked on the research paper over time and did not run out of topics to write about as I used the essentials of each work in the writing and could draw on more detail if needed. With all that I’ve learned the sense of dread before writing gets diminished more and more.
When it comes to writing, planning and conceptualizing a plan for what to write using rhetorical skills can not only make your writing better but makes the process easier.
Works Cited
Jean-Charles, Garody. “Phase 1 Multimodal Language and Literacy Narrative”. English 110,2021.
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