It’s amazing how much things can change over the course of six weeks. This is something I have thought about a lot in the recent past because at nineteen years old, life changes extremely quickly. The people I meet at any given point could have massive influence upon my life and my dreams and ambitions are as easily swayed as a lawn chair in a hurricane. Very few things in my life are fixed, and everything else is constantly changing.
My feelings about this class at its onset were very different than how I feel now. Words you could have used to describe my feelings would have included overwhelmed, confused, inadequate… I really felt like I had no idea what I was doing and I was not very pleased with how much I was being pushed to think critically and be creative in this class. I was used to getting A’s on papers in my General Ed. even when I wrote them the night before. This class was definitely different.
A month ago this is what I thought about my theory composing…
I believe that one of the, if not the single most important part of composing “good writing” is style. My writing style is clear and concise. I like to get to the point quickly and allow my readers to know exactly how I feel about things. I’m not a big fan of hidden meanings or symbols but I do enjoy using sarcasm on occasion and I also like to relate big questions about life to seemingly insignificant activities (for example, I wrote an essay about how I discovered I want to respond to the world by working with children this summer and how all of the small things they did and said revealed deeper meanings involving their innocence, purity, etc.). Good writing should give the reader a sense of who the author is. Good writing is composed of basic elements and follows set structure, but it is also creative and interesting.
I still like this summary of my composing style, but it’s only been a month since I wrote it. I do think in hindsight I would add more of my actually composing process to this theory. It’s true that one of my favorite topics to write about is revelation from the small and seemingly insignificant parts of life. But how do I come up with those ideas? I journal. I love to journal. I write about what God is teaching me, what I am reading about, my day-to-day life, prayers, etc. It is usually from these journal entries that I springboard into more formal writing. So my theory of composing is a lot of brainstorming and writing out that brainstorming in the form of journal entries. It includes this process because it is the easiest way for me to make sense of my many thoughts and ideas. After I find an idea I usually call my Mom (hey, don’t judge) and ask her opinion. That usually weeds out the crazy stuff.
Knowledge is a funny thing. Going along with my “ever changing” theme, knowledge is indeed fluid and always changing. We used to think the world was flat. I used to think my mother was an elf in Santa’s workshop. We count things we “know” as knowledge, but what we know is only based on other things we know. It is all relative. Knowledge is all based on prior knowledge. In this class I thought I knew what rhetoric meant. But after studying it more, my ideas changed and I learned new information about rhetoric that increased and changed my knowledge. It is a circle and it is constantly changing, but knowledge is vitally important because it is how we relate to other people. It is how we are able to understand the world around us. It is fitting that knowledge is in constant motion because so are we.
I think it’s important to stop and look back every once in a while. You can learn a lot from analyzing the past and you can definitely learn a lot by reflecting on your past successes and mistakes. This principle is something that I try to do in my writing. While often I would love to burn my old writings and never, ever look at them again, I can learn a lot about what I can change and make better by reading through them. Even writing this blog post has been helpful to me in order to really understand what I have learned, where I started and where I am now. Reflection can solidify our experiences. It's important every once in a while that we stop and smell the roses.
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