Gateway to Writing

From Assistive Technology Blog, by the Virginia Department of Education's Training and Technical Assistance Center

Writing about writing. Reading about reading. Thinking about thinking. This is the class, Writing 200: Gateway to Writing, which spawned this whole site for better or worse and made me reconsider and dig deeper into concepts that we normally take for granted. So many times, when we write we only think about what we’re writing about, not how we’re writing and interacting with ideas, not why either. By deconstructing writing, I learned to appreciate writing more as a process. Most times when I write for school, it’s about the result; if you’re lucky, a professor will talk about what they want you to write, it’s up to you to produce it. In this class, we talked about that middle part that professors usually don’t talk about as much, between when the assignment is given and when you turn it in.  All this discussion was great. I liked getting to hear about what  peers’ thoughts. They were all different kinds of writers and wrote different kinds of things, so their was a breadth of styles and processes to learn from. Sometimes, in order to become a better writer, you can learn from other people. Branch off from them, if you will. (Because I’m not fulfilling my tree metaphor quota).

A big part of this course was also blogging. I’ve never thought of myself as much of a blogger. Or really questioned what made blogging different from other mediums. I just knew that it was a kind of writing my parents sneered at. Now, however, I appreciate the breadth of blogging- it’s not just emo kids writing poems about becoming vampires and lover suicides. Many blog writers are just as capable as their formally published counterparts. Moreover they enjoy certain advantages. They can reach their audience in an instant. And their audience can reach back. They can connect readers directly with their sources. They aren’t confined to words and black and white pictures. They can share music, video, pictures. When I started blogging, I gained access to all these advantages. Blogging helped me reflect because I could see it as a record of my changing thoughts and ideas of this class. It helped me to write more. Blogging, for me, was really connected with the “observation” aspect because when I blog, I take something I’ve thought and develop it some more. But because it’s a blog I don’t have to write a whole argumentative thesis. I can just explore. This helped me grow as a writer. Blogging also helpedme connect to my writing peers who really know there stuff. An archive of my blog posts is available on the sidebar in the “Blog Roll” widget. I also talk about this more in my  Please take a look.

Within this section you will find, my Re-mediating and Re-purposing Project, my “Why I Write Essay” and my “Writing New Media” Essay. For more information on each topic and assignment, please take at the “intro pages” for each assignment and the essays themselves. Each are demonstrative of things we talked about in the writing process-  for example, why you start the process (“Why I Write”) and how the process is changed by different mediums (“Writing New Media” and “Re-mediating an Argument”).  All this different medias and exploration of process helped me stretch as a writer. Sometimes writing about the writing process is another genre in and of itself. All genres require those same central skills and that’s what I worked on in Writing 200, the strong trunk and the branches.

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