Throughout my time in school, few English classes have made me take a more introspective look at myself and how my writing affects more than my grades. While my time in Writing and Rhetoric I hasn’t been an entirely life-altering experience, it has broadened my views towards my own writing. I believe it’s an important milestone in my development as a writer. The writings from my class that are on this blog forced me to think about my past experiences which have developed my writing up to this point in my life as well as develop my current writing to style to meet the expected criteria which varied greatly from assignment to assignment.

The first essay of the semester that the class was assigned was a sort of reflective piece that was designed to make writers think about their past experiences. Ideally, the goal of the essay was to make a point to the reader. When I wrote the paper, it became about more than just making a point to the reader for me. A large amount of the paper’s significance shifted to seeing how my past writing experiences have developed my current writing styles. The subject of the essay focused largely on a part of my life that was highly influential in my school year prior to coming to college. During my junior and senior years of high school, rather than participating in a typical sport or club, I chose to make video media technology my primary extracurricular. Aside from the numerous unique events and opportunities that this choice provided me with, improvement of my writing skills was one of the most beneficial things I received from the time I spent in the courses. In my writing, I reflect on this subject in detail and expand on how it improved my writing skills and got me to where I am now.

The second prompt of the semester for English and Rhetoric was titled “Guide to Writing in a Genre”. As stated in the title, the most obvious goal of the essay was to develop a writer’s ability to think about a genre, what makes something qualify as a genre, and then explain to a reader how to create some form of media in the aforementioned genre. The first lesson that I took away from the assignment was the identification of a genre and it’s characteristics. Prior to undertaking this task, I only had broad ideas of what made a “genre”. My idea was mainly that a genre was any collection or grouping of media that shared common features or characteristics. When writing the assignment, my view of genres was broadened in the sense that I started realizing more than just books, films, and music could be categorized into genres. I attempted to show this by taking a more unconventional approach to my subject matter. Rather than trying to teach someone how to write a horror novel or country song, my goal became to teach someone how to write in a more atypical genre — the Java programming language. Going into this, I did have prior experience with Java. Understanding the concepts I was trying to teach wasn’t an issue because of this. What was new was thinking about the language in the sense of a genre, breaking the lesson down systematically, and making sure all aspects were explained in full while staying within the constraints set out by the rubric. This meant that the experience also doubled as a brief exercise in teaching for me which could be a useful development for any future writing.

The final assignment our class worked on was a discourse community ethnography. Prior to being in Writing and Rhetoric, I (and presumably many of my classmates) had no idea what even constituted a “discourse community ethnography”. As it turns out, a discourse community ethnography involves analyzing a community or group of people who are united by commonalities like a shared lexis, discourse culture, and set of goals. The rubric for this particular assignment asked us to analyze a discourse community that we have previously been a part of or that we are currently a part of. Because of my choice to go to Virginia Military Institute, my exposure to varied discourse communities was extremely limited in the semester that I had Writing and Rhetoric I. This being the case, I wrote about VMI’s unique discourse community during the period of the school year known as the “ratline”. As a writer, this allowed me to develop by letting me observe my college and community from an outside perspective. While I had already become enculturated into most aspects of the VMI community, I was now observing the specific characteristics which came together to make VMI into a community. This included the lexis, the shared goals, and the historical background of VMI.

By getting exposed to these assignments, my writing was able to develop in a number of stages. First by reflecting on my past work. Then by allowing me to develop skills in creativity, teaching, and analyzing a genre. Finally, it developed by allowing me to expand on the skills used to analyze a genre to also encompass skills used to analyze entire communities. This shows that, while I’m no modern-day Hemingway or Steinbeck, these essays helped improve my writing. I was able to analyze my own writing more critically and implement new strategies for revision.