My Theory of Writing

Dear Journal,

It is 2:19 on December 8th, 2019 and I am procrastinating. I was asked to write a paper about my theory of writing. I was confused about what the theory of writing was because I have never heard of that before. I tried to understand what my teacher meant by that. But now thinking about it, it should mean how I go about to my writing process. I believe that writing should be fun and easy once the author has an outline.

Knowing what my theory of writing depends on my past writings and my reflections. Once I look at what writing pieces I did in this class, alongside the writing pieces we did in other classes, it should show us how I write and what my theory of writing is. Unfortunately, I cannot look back at some of my work. For example, I don’t have access to most of my writing pieces from high school because I changed laptops before I started college. So it makes sense that I am confused about my theory of writing.

Even though my theory of writing will change in the future, I noticed that to write an interesting paper, I like to make sure that my audience knows that I understand my topic.
To me, writing is taking the ideas from our brain and putting them into sensible words. And this can be difficult because sometimes I have a hard time expressing my thoughts. Sometimes, I do enjoy writing, but only when I am allowed to free write whatever topic I choose. It is incredibly difficult when I don’t fully understand the topic and when I still have questions about what I am told to write. To write, I like to be by myself.

I like to sit in a quiet room. The room is not quite per se, but I like to be in a room with no distractions. I like to listen to music. The genre of music isn’t specific. I also like to play YouTube videos as background noise. I think that because I listen to music or play YouTube videos, it reminds me that these people expressing their creativity. This keeps me motivated.

I think the aesthetic is a factor that helps with my writing process. The room to be perfectly lite. I like my room to have a dim light on during the night because I usually get a headache when I have a bright light on while I’m staring at my computer for a few hours doing work. If I am doing my work during the day time, I like to open my curtains to allow the natural light to come in and I like to light a candle as well.

Eating food and drinking either water or juice is another factor that helps me get creative. I love food and snacks, so eating during my writing process gives me an excuse to take a break. It allows me to collect my thoughts and edit my work or to restructure my writing.

When writing, I prefer to get feedback so I can improve my writing. I understand that people don’t like getting feedback because they are confident in their writing, but in most cases, I am not fully confident in what I write. In my Freshman English class, we do peer review. This method helps a lot because I receive feedback from multiple readers with different opinions. After I get my comments, I try to combine all of the comments and I fix my writing. For example, for my source-based research paper, the peer review session was very helpful for me because the sources I used were very vague and the peers helped me example my thoughts. Another example would be for my two- genres assignment. The feedback I got on this assignment was that I should draw a picture to express the political side of my topic. I was debating on doing that because I wasn’t sure how to explain myself through a drawing. But my peers helped me create an idea on what to draw and how to add the specific details.

Using a rhetoric analysis in my writing has helped develop my theory of writing. Using the analysis, it makes sure I include all the points I am trying to make in my papers. This includes the author, genre, audience, language, tone, purpose, medium, and stance of the evidence that I am citing. When thoroughly explaining the author, genre, audience, etc., the reader can clearly understand the purpose of my paper.