Writer's Journal #6 - Your Writing Practices OVERVIEW Throughout this course you will think and write about your relationship to your own writing practices; in fact, a sizable portion of your final portfolio will deal with this relationship. Being aware of one’s writing practices and shaping those practices help writers to become more efficient and effective as they produce various texts. DIRECTIONS In this Writer’s Journal, you will have the opportunity to explore your relationship to writing, your writing practices, and how this relationship might change in the course of this class. To help you in this reflection, please respond to the following questions: What role has writing played in your life? Describe your relationship to writing and language. How would you describe your previous writing experiences, overall? Whether good or bad, in what ways have your writing experiences prepared you for, or led you to, this course? What do you hope to do with writing in the future? How might you draw upon prior writing experiences in order to achieve those goals? What do you need to practice in order to be a more successful writer? What do you hope to gain from this writing course and its members? What are your expectations for yourself in this course? What are your expectations for the other members of the course? Be sure to be as detailed and thorough as possible, and use examples to help explain your response. Be sure to read over your response to be sure it says what you want it to say. I must admit that writing plays a vital role in my career development, as well as my daily life. We write every day, for example, emails and short messages. What is more, we need writing when we make applications to scholarship or other funding. We also should write reports to our boss or some other ones if we want to persuade them to do what we want them to do or think in a way which we hope them to have. Frankly speaking, I seldom practice my writing intentionally until I found it is really hard to raise my writing score in a standardized English test and thus, I think I should spend a lot of time on writing practice as well as the language learning.
Because of my lack of writing experience, or I would more like to take my former writing experience as unintentional writings, I could hardly to write some excellent articles, no matter the academic papers or a summary of a full report. In my opinion, my writing experiences until now just help myself have a basic and direct mind about whether this is a good article and why it is good in my own idea. In the future, I hope to write more reports to enlarge my impact in our industry, and also have impacts in real life. Furthermore, writing experience, in my opinion, could also help myself to build my own knowledge system and strengthen my understanding of my current knowledge. To become a more successful writer, especially in my field, I should enhance my skills in the following areas:
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OVERVIEW Encountering “rhetoric” and the “rhetorical situation” for the first time can be surprising for many students. These concepts seem familiar, but often this familiarity is vague or under-defined. However, by becoming more aware of the “rhetorical situation” and working with this awareness, we can better understand what we are doing in and with our writing. DIRECTIONS In this Writer’s Journal, you will have the opportunity to think about “rhetoric,” “the rhetorical situation,” and your understanding of these terms. To help you in this reflection, please respond to the following questions: Based on the readings and videos that you read/watched during week one, how would you describe “rhetoric”? What is “the rhetorical situation” and how do you see an awareness of this concept affecting your writing and behaviors? Describe a recent writing experience or activity where you used rhetoric to effectively convey a message to a specific audience? What was the purpose of the message? Who was the audience? How did you go about appealing to that audience? In what ways do you see your understanding of rhetoric and the rhetorical situation affecting your future writing projects? The WPA Outcomes lists “Rhetorical Knowledge” first in the list of outcomes areas. What does this say about the importance of rhetorical knowledge to writing? Given your experience of the course so far, how important does rhetorical knowledge seem to writing and the writing process? Be sure to be as detailed and thorough as possible, and use examples to help explain your response. Be sure to read over your response to be sure it says what you want it to say. Rhetoric is a strategy and the selection of different words to be used in writing, speaking and videos to persuade people to believe in the things or ideas you presented to them or to think in the way you show them.
The rhetorical situation may be some special techniques the writer use or in some circumstances where rhetorical methods usually occur. After knowing this, I will spend some time to learn rhetorical methods, try to identify them in my later reading, try to avoid using them apparently when I write in some conditions, and design the rhetoric stratedy appropriately. As my recent writing experience, I would like to share a recent report writing in Chinese because I have few opportunities to writing long essays and reports in English. The topic is about the analysis of Chinese Oversea Direct Investments (ODIs). The aim of this report is to analysis the status and the trend of Chinese ODIs and provide some suggestions in the future for the policy makers. The audiences of the report, in my opinion, includes the policy makers, the researchers in this field, the students and anyone who interests in this topic. The way I use to appeal these audiences is simple actually and is try to abtain numbers and use advanced visulization techniques to present the data in some new ways. In this way, I could provide some novel ideas based on my analysis and then use my professional knowledge and research methdologies in another field to give some suggestions from the view of a non econimists. My understanding of rhetoric and the rhetorical situation will influence my future works significantly. The more techniques and strategies I know, the more choices I could make to answer different demand in different situations. What is more, it could also affect my words' selection, the way I present my data which could support the argument in the writing and paragraph arrangements which could offer different reading experience for the readers. What does this say about the importance of rhetorical knowledge to writing? Given your experience of the course so far, how important does rhetorical knowledge seem to writing and the writing process? According to the Outcome 1 of WPA Outcomes, key rhetorical concepts need to be learned and researched if you want to use them in your writing intentionly. Furthermore, differnt genres have different ways to use these concepts. These rhetorical techniques and ideas will affect the writing in wide range of ways and generate various influence on the reading experience of the readers. As far as I know, rhetorical knowledge will affect the credibility of one article and the readers' interest to read it. If these knowlege is used properly, it will drive the readers read the writing from the beginning to the end. In the vedio of the course, we could know that the rhetoric appeals in three kind: ethos, logos and pathos. Every effect will affect the trustness of the ariticle. To make the ariticale believable, of course, there is no doubt that you should use approprivate ethos and logos. However, the use of pathos also matters. If it is used, for the one who believes you, he or she will believe in you stronger. On the contrary, for the ones who doubt you, they will definitely think you are playing emotinoal games with them. OVERVIEW Writers of all kinds often collaborate on writing projects. This can occur in person, or (as is increasingly the case) this collaboration can occur at a distance through digital technologies such as our online course. Sometimes this collaboration happens in the drafting of a piece of writing, but it can also occur in every stage of the writing process. . DIRECTIONS In this Writer’s Journal, you will consider what collaborative writing means to you. You will do this by addressing the following questions: How does the notion of writing collaboratively challenge your sense of what a writer is and does? Do you find collaborating on your writing exciting or intimidating? Why? What do you think you might learn or gain from collaborating with other writers? One of the bullets under the WPA Outcomes “Process” heading reads, “By the end of first -year composition, students should...Experience the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.” Why do you think the WPA Outcomes value the “collaborative and social aspects of the writing process?” What does this say about academic writing and collaboration? Be sure to be as detailed and thorough as possible, and use examples to help explain your response. Be sure to read over your response to be sure it says what you want it to say. Collaborative writing means a group of writers write a book or a report that one writer could not finished because of limitation of knowledge or time. To me, it means I could contribute a greater work that I could never achieve by myself and generate a greater impact. In my opinion, nowadays, writers are more likely to work alone, especially in some special kinds of writings, such as novels and fictions. Actually, most books I buy is written by one or two writers. Writing collaboratively means a group with more than three people writes together. The book has one topic, however different people contribute different part of the book. In this condition, a writer is only a contributor to one book not the writer of the whole one. However, there is a group of writer, there must be a leader, who not only contributes to the book's content, but also be in charge of the communication between writers and the organization of writer's communication. Right now, I found it seems more intimidating to me. Different people's contribution differs. Someone would like to contribute more time and works on one book or report, however some other one does not because of various reasons. The books credibility may be affected because of someone's unresponsibility. However, working with brilliant and responsible talents is a great thing. When writing together with these people, I have a chance to learn a lot from them, especially in the aspect of the professional areas. In addtion, we could also learn their rhetorical strategies which is so valued in our course before. Last but not least, working in a group could also offers us an opportunity to learn the leadership skills and communication techniques from the group leader in my opinion. The reason WPA Outcomes value the collabarative writing is because, in our real work, we could never work alone and we must collaborate with each other. Nowadays, as the exposion of knowledge, one people could hardly know so much details in different domains. Therefore, we should also work together. This is especially important in academic writing. Sometimes, people from different areas of research could inspire each other. This is also the value of inter-discipline. Take the research of climate change as an example, scientists from climate research, energy research, earth research, as well as computer science, should work together to get the research done. As the development of other traditional science, such as mathematics, biology, chemistry, computer science also plays a vital role in them. Therefore, some frontier research outcomes also presented by a collabration of two or more scientist from different background. |
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