Theory of Writing:

From Experience to Knowledge

December 15, 2019

Brinda Kemgne
Sophomore, Accounting Major
The City College of New York

Dear Brinda, “The Freshman,”

I hope you are doing well. I am okay except the anxiety that is too much. But I hope that by the end of this, it will go. I am pretty sure you are wondering how your first year of college is going to go. I know you are full of anxiety. You’re not sure of having the grades you hoped so bad while you were in High School for this first year of college. You’re out each day studying hard, hoping to meet your goals, and planning to give me the best future ever. I know this. I have seen this because I am you—from the future and thanks for all you have done couldn’t be better without your hard work. I have gone through great pains to get this letter to you in hopes that I can answer questions you have not even considered yet. The points I am going to make in this letter may seem arbitrary to you today, but in time they will truly help you grow the power of language and composition that is buried deep inside you. Read each point of this letter very carefully.

What is my theory of writing?

Just because I am you from the future, I know what you’re thinking. You’re like I never hear of this, well, I will let you know what it is. The theory of writing is a description of what we understand writing to be and how our writing practices have worked in the past, currently work, and might work in the future. Well, what is ours? After thinking a lot, I’ve found it. Writing is about expressing your feelings. You go through experiences in life, then when you feel like expressing yourself, writing most of the time is the best thing ever. Like any other human you love to experience, your theory of writing is going to evolve. It will become much more than one experience. After you have learned new things through experiences with the right people and evil, you will discover a new life composed of purpose, pieces of knowledge, and ambitions. There is a process of growth for the writing, just as it is for life. Writing needs its photosynthesis; they are Researching, Rhetorical Analysis, and Revising. Each of these is part of our theory of writing. We gain ideas through a cycle of—form going into life with no fear of a knowledge meaning.

R1: Researching

Coming into Freshman Composition, your idea of researching went a little like this: Google, google some more, a little more—and done. In Freshman Composition, however, your theory of writing will grow out of the research. You will learn to seek until you find it. You will continue to look for the experience of truth, but now you will look for it in various sources. That means you will have to get familiar with different genres for your life’s experiences: magazine articles, newspapers, print articles, essays, scholarly articles, websites, YouTube videos, etc. The process of finding suitable-experiences will be way much more complicated than you expected, but it is this process that will strengthen your work, it will allow you to make meaning out of what you read. Our process looks like this: (1) coming up with a series of keywords for our search. (2) using the search box of a credible online database from Google Scholar to CUNY Onesearch, where your favorite databases will be Jstor, Academic OneFile, and EbscoHost. (3) Searching until you discover other best experiences that can support your essay. (4) Scanning the document for your keywords to find pieces of evidence (4) Narrowing down your search for the necessary genres (newspaper, magazine, web, and scholarly).

R2: Rhetorical Analysis

Before Composition 1//English 110, your theory of writing went a little like this: Writing is profound. It’s about going below at the bottom of a text. And finding the knowledge hiding down there. Before this class, you assumed that at the heart of all documents, there was a stance that the author wanted to share with the reader. You were concerned about finding the purpose behind a text, but looking back, you only had a few tools to bring this experience to a piece of vast knowledge. For instance, do you remember your final research paper in high school, US Immigration Policy Laws Life: An argumentative essay?

This essay was a great accomplishment at the time. It taught you a lot about how to read a text to understand its purpose. It taught you how to draw evidence from the context and the author to interpret the work. It even showed you how to pull evidence from the text to support your Claims. It can be likened to another essay you will come across in your first-year writing class: The Source-Based Essay. In this essay, you will be assigned to pick a language-based topic. Then, you will find four sources (a magazine article, a newspaper article, a scholarly article, a web-based source) on that topic and do a rhetorical analysis of those sources. I know it is really hard, but trust me, this process may seem complicated, but it is not. A rhetorical analysis consists of analyzing the bombastic parts of an essay as put forth by Aristotle, but even further-so by the necessary elements of the rhetorical situation. Rhetoric itself has to do with any piece of writing that is used to influence its audience. The rhetorical situation is whatever problem (context, existence, purpose, author) existed to bring that writing into a reality. So far, so good? Well, further rhetorical analysis on any source requires you to know nine rhetorical components. At the moment, you know about three. Digging through a text to find your “seed” of truth will not do for the Source-Based Essay. You will need to understand the entire ecosystem of the seed to do a quality rhetorical analysis. You will need to locate, explain, and support the text’s author, audience, tone, purpose, stance, genre, language, medium, and rhetorical situation.

Thus, in your first essay of college writing, you will have to understand far more about finding the life’s experience in the text. Your theory of writing will be concerned with finding the knowledge and growing it by not giving up with other elements—rhetorical “elements” that is. Just as animals. Writing is expressing yourself, that requires an life’s experiences. Our theory looks at all the elements of a text. From the publisher down to the font, to extract meaning around the relationship between author, tone, purpose, genre, and more. You will have to understand and take responsibility for the rhetorical parts of the text. Here is an example of a news source I found using an online database called Jstor, which will be new to you since you are not accustomed to using anything besides Google Scholar. Like your high school paper, you will be able to pinpoint the author, purpose, and stance quite quickly. Other rhetorical parts will be more challenging to support and locate.

R3: Revision

Revision is the aspect of our writing that will contribute most to our growth.

knowing your own experiences is important, just as important as integrating the right elements of rhetorical analysis and seeking the right nutrients of research. But the most helpful part of the writing process is gaining different view points from peer reviews. The revision process will introduce you to peer reviews with other students, who will use a rubric to give you feedback on what is most important. In this process, you will find such a refreshment from seeing how other knowledge grow. Often, you will even share growth concepts. Revisiting your drafts after getting feedback is pivotal because it gives you the new lens you need. Here is a look at how you used group feedback to make some upgrades to you draft:

The Growth

The growth is where you see someone being better that who they were yesterday when you take step by step.

In one of your assignments, Composition in Two Parts, you will use two different genres to communicate the key message(s) to the audience of your choosing. Here is where you go from experimenting life to seeing the hard times and goods come alive.

 Writing isn’t just about the experience. By now, I think you’ve seen that. If you invest in those experiences, starting by living the little that you can, you will see a knowledge coming up. What is the relationship between our theory of writing and how we create this knowledge? It’s a cycle of courage, to offer the most critical and inventive ideas we can, to hold them up to the light of evidence, to weigh them against the elements of rhetoric, and to allow them to be changed. That is our correct theory of writing. It is our real journey from experiences to knowledge. If you take that step each time you write, your knowledge will become the holder of each pain you’ll ever experience, able to hold beyond your wildest dreams. And you see, that is the utility of our experiences. Though they start much of the time with pain, they grow to produce knowledge. 

 

I know this letter is a lot to take in right now, which is why I put it in a letter genre so that you could always have something to go back to. Anytime you feel overwhelmed or lost, return to this letter and let it remind you that your future is in good hands—your own.

You got this. See you around, brendy.

Sincerely,

Brinda Kemgne—2020