Write about what you'd like to write about. But write!

Wow! A chance to write about anything? This is exciting, yet terrifying. In just one semester of graduate school, I’ve become used to writing to some sort of prompt. Writing has become a part of my daily routine; in actuality, I’m writing when I’m eating breakfast and when I’m driving. I write when I’m watching television and when I’m walking in my neighborhood. What I mean is that I am constantly composing thoughts that may take the form of written words but more often than not remain strings of thoughts.

Many of my friends write blogs where they discuss with friends and strangers every nuance of their life. Dinner plans, reviews on the latest movie, and rants about their jobs are just a few subjects discussed. Gone are the days where we pick up the phone and ask one another about our lives. There’s no need with blogs and other social media platforms. This is problematic to me because it takes the element of surprise and genuine interest out of our interactions. I like to think that I’m still old-fashioned because I refuse to chronicle my every move on the internet, but, I think I’m really just behind the times. It still baffles me when my grandmother calls me to inquire about an event I attended or about an outfit I wore because she saw it on Facebook. No, she doesn’t have a Facebook account; rather, she has family members that like to blab to her about my whereabouts. She means no harm with these inquiries because she sees Facebook as an extension of our face-to-face family interactions.

I mention all of this to say that multi-modal forms of communication have become a way of life for most Americans. Having the ability to see someone while talking to them in a different time zone is amazing. But, with all of these forms of communication, are we actually becoming closer to each other? Or is the technology pushing us away from one another? Are the conversations we have about unimportant occurrences? Or are they about meaningful experiences?

To combat this feeling of being in technology limbo, I’ve started to write physical notes and letters to friends and family. It’s exciting to me to draft my thoughts on paper, copy them over to my “nice” letter-writing stock, and mail it off. It’s also pretty expensive to do this since stamps are almost 50 cents each. I feel satisfied when my recipient opens my letter and is able to physically see and feel my thoughts. Maybe I feel like my words are permanent when written on paper? Do they have more meaning when transmitted this way?

This was truly a random post! I’ve thought about this subject for some time but hadn’t been able to put my thoughts into sentences. 

Thank you Dr. Rice for your wisdom and guidance this semester! I’ve really enjoyed this class and learned much more than I could have ever expected to. If I do teach in the future, I’ll have the guidance you provided as a road map to success.

What is the thesis to your article for this course? What support will you cite to help you make your case?

This assignment makes me both nervous and excited. I’ve never written an essay with the goal of publication, but am glad we are jumping into this during our first semester in graduate school. With that being said, I’m planning to approach this assignment by breaking it into several related parts.

My thesis isn’t solid yet, but I have a general idea of what I want to write about. Here are the ideas/themes I am exploring in relation to composition studies:

• Crossing boundaries between student and teacher.
• Crossing boundaries between cultures, languages, and geographical regions.
• Crossing boundaries across academic disciplines.

Some of the authors that we’ve read in class that I plan to use for my research are: Royster, Fulkerson, and Bizzell.

Part of the research I plan to undertake is on how these boundaries have shifted over the past few decades. Are the boundaries more transparent today?

Review the learning objectives for this course. What's one thing you've learned that connects to an objective and to your future job? Also, what sorts of training do you wish you could have / could HAVE had?

This course has taught me a great deal about the history of composition studies as well as how to teach composition to students. Although I don’t immediately plan to teach after completion of this degree, this is valuable information that will assist me throughout my career. All of the learning objectives for this course are important, but the one that I have learned the most about is audience awareness. In this course, we’ve learned to analyze audience and purpose in rhetorical situations and make appropriate choices.

Audience awareness has been a part of my vocabulary and factors into my practical application in the workplace. In my experience, audience awareness is utilized when writing for a client or customer. Composition programs worry if the lessons they teach their students will be retained and used in future workplace situations. I believe much of their worry isn’t warranted as today, more than ever, audience/user centered awareness is understood. For example, I worked for an automobile insurance company that valued making the customer’s experience a pleasant one their first priority. All portions of the customer experience, including letters sent out about coverage, website design, and documents related to accident claims were customer focused. We often asked, “How will the customer consume this information? Is it useful to them? Will it lead them to remain a customer?” Without taking these questions into consideration, the insurance company would not have been able to gain new customers or retain the current customer base. This was the first company I worked for after completing my undergraduate degree and I was excited to find that audience awareness was truly practiced in the workplace. Now that I reflect on my experiences at this company, I realize that many companies miss the mark where audience awareness is concerned. They often have no connection with their customers and can only speculate on what the customer expects. Now that I am back in the classroom, I am glad to see that audience awareness is still perceived as being important in the workplace. Without it, I suppose it would seem like employees are talking at the customer instead of having a conversation with them.

For this week’s blog, I also wanted to talk about the question Dr. Rice asked about training. If we are discussing training as a document instructor in the composition program, my wish is that I would have had a chance to review student writing prior to starting the position. My expectations of the type of writing I would see and my response to this writing are very different from the reality. On the job training is definitely a common practice, but in this composition program, I think it is a disservice to the student, as well as the instructors. In my case, I haven’t reviewed academic writing in over 6 years; instead, my most recent experiences have been with workplace communications, which are very different from student essays. Having an idea of what is expected of me before grading “live” student documents would have been very helpful.

Identify where you think students may fail in an assignment in your syllabus, and how you will use that as a teachable moment by design. If you didn't produce a syllabus, discuss the relevance of this week's readings to your future workplace.

I have many revisions to make to my syllabus assignment, but, I am fairly sure that one assignment I will keep is my photo essay/visual rhetoric exploration assignment. In this assignment, students will take a series of photos that describe an experience that is important to them. For example, describe the best birthday you ever had or describe how you felt after you received your first car. To help narrow the focus of the assignment, students will be required to complete this using no more than 15 photos. Photos can be ones taken by the student or photos found online that are okay to use under fair use laws. The purpose of this assignment is for students to learn how to express themselves without using words by taking into account the story that can be told by a series of photos. When selecting photos, I’d like students to take into account the order in which the present the photos as well as the emotions the photos will likely evoke from their audience of fellow students.

I think this is an assignment where students may falter because the format will be very unfamiliar to them and will require a different type of thinking to accomplish successfully. Also, this assignment will require students to reflect in a way that they may not have before. If a student is coming into my course straight out of high school, this may be the first time they’ve been asked to reflect on their life in this manner. We are a culture that takes a multitude of photos, but how often do we stop and reflect on them other than the surface message they present? My hope is that students will find this assignment to be a rewarding experience and will aid in their development as writers by opening their eyes in different ways.

I suppose failure in this assignment would be if a student doesn’t delve deeply enough into their photo analysis and the sequence of their essay doesn’t make sense. How would I make this a teachable moment? I think the best way to go about this would be to ask students to think about how events are normally sequenced in their lives. For example, if you are taking pictures outdoors, watch the positioning of the sun in your photos. If you are selecting photos from different places (personal collection plus photos found on the internet) how are you connecting them together? Do they flow well or do they seem disjointed? Life events generally have a logical flow—this essay assignment should also have the same logical progression of events.