Spring 2004
Section 8, 12:-12:50pm MTWRF

English 101.10 -- Language and Composition I

What is Writing?

Here is what we came up with as a class

Writing is (a/an)...
Writing is like....

• building a house (a process)
• frustrating
• details/topics
• expression of feelings
• outlet for stress
• difficult
• expression of thought
• hard to improve at (like basketball)
• inventing
• therapy
• documentation of thoughts
• way of life
• thoughts/ideas/interpretation
• influenced by emotions
• time consuming
• technology
• collaborative/interactive

In this class, there is room for writing to be all of these things and more. Hopefully as the semester progresses, it will become less frustrating and will become more comfortable. It's okay to not like writing all of the time; just keep working at it!

For my contribution, I said that I sometimes think of writing as a technology. I'd better explain, since it's not the most intuitive way of thinking about writing. To me, writing, television, films, music, art, and digital multimedia are all technologies that we use to represent or communicate something about the world in which we live. These technologies are part of the expression of what we think, feel, know and value. When we write, we share a version of reality with our readers and ask them to become participants in it. So, not only do we use tools to write (stone, parchment, paper, pencil, ink, computers, etc.), but writing, like any language, is also a tool that we can learn to use in different ways.