Welcome to our course blog! In this English 1101 class “Changing Writing, Changing the World” we will be recording the progress of our class, publishing our writing on social justice, and creating a resource for future students. Every week we will include a “Write-Up” of what we’ve been doing. Here is our first one.
Reading for Class:
We started the week by reading a very important document — the course syllabus! Dr. Crowther impressed upon us the importance of the syllabus as both an informative text and a “contract” in which the expectations of the students and the professor are explained. As a contract, we are all held to the syllabus which is why it is so important to understand and be familiar with all the policies and requirements it describes. In order to check that we all had read and understood the syllabus, Dr. C put a quiz on iCollege for all students to complete. Students were also asked to sign a contract declaring that they had read and understood the syllabus, and also granting or denying permission for the professor to use their work in other classes or publications.
The second reading assignment was taken from our course textbook, Changing Writing. The introduction “How Writing is Changing” introduced several key concepts for the course. The first was the idea that writing always does something. Writing is usually “to convince others to think or act differently” (Johnson-Eilola 3). Although this idea of writing is always true, the way we write has been evolving and transforming over the centuries. Not only the tools we use — from pen and paper to typewriter to computer — but also the kinds of texts we draft, write and publish. Now we all have access to the internet with its overwhelming amount of information that requires us to search for the most relevant and reliable sources to support our ideas. We also can work collaboratively on documents using online tools, and we can publish our work online to a worldwide audience. The next section in the chapter discusses how this book can help us become better writers. The question it poses is “How can I learn a universal, flexible way to write any kind of text” (5). The book explains that students learn strategies and frameworks for understanding texts and creating their own. It introduces the four key aspects of writing:
- PURPOSE: the change you want to make in readers’ thinking, feeling, or acting
- AUDIENCE: people within a context who are making meaning
- CONTEXT: a location in a space and time or even an online space
- TEXT: a document or other designed object
Finally, the chapter discusses that writing is messy! Although we like to think that writing is an easy, linear process, it actually requires lots of drafts, mistakes, revising, etc. We have to be ready to get messy and learn!
Class lecture/discussion/activities:
In class on Tuesday, we spent time introducing ourselves and learning more about our professor and the class. Every student gave a short introduction and we learned an “interesting fact” about each other. Dr. Crowther went over the syllabus and discussed some of the important policies covered in the syllabus.
On Thursday, we completed our first “Daily Grade” free-write in which we discussed how we feel about ourselves as writers. Many students shared that they feel stressed or anxious about writing, while some enjoyed specific types of writing situations. Dr. Crowther began talking about how we are all writers even if we don’t realize it. She discussed how we take into consideration the four elements of composition and rhetoric — Purpose, Audience, Context, Text — every time we write an email or send a text. Using a funny example of a text with emojis, Dr. C explained how important tone is when we consider how we want to communicate to our audience. We continued to discuss the writing process and how then we talked in groups about a “text” we had brought to class that represents something we read everyday. Some students discussed websites that they read and others brought books, magazines, text messages, and social media. We noticed that there is usually a specific audience for a text but that now, with social media, articles can be shared and so might end up in a more general audience than the original context intended.
Additional Resources:
Here is a useful video on Rhetoric and the Rhetorical Triangle: