Writing is

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Writing is

• Making Meaning for Yourself
• Making Meaning for Others

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Making Meaning for Yourself

• Writing for expression
• Writing for understanding
• Writing for transformation
• Writing for aesthetic pleasure (to create beauty)

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Making Meaning for Others

• Writing to inform
• Writing to explain
• Writing to persuade
• Writing to share beauty
• Writing to convey feeling

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Ways of Being a Writer

• The artist
• The technician
• The scholar
• The seeker

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The Artists Studio

• (from The Way to Rainy Mountain by Scott
  Momaday)
• At a distance in July or August the steaming
  foliage seems almost to writhe in fire. Great
  green-and-yellow grasshoppers are everywhere in
  the tall grass, popping up like corn to sting the
  flesh, and tortoises crawl about on the red
  earth, going nowhere in plenty of time.
  Loneliness is an aspect of the land. All things
  in the plain are isolate there is no confusion
  of objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree
  or one man.

• The writer conveys his or her feelings and
  personal perspective on the subject.
• This subjective writing includes figurative
  language simile, metaphor, personification, etc.

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The Technicians Lab

• (by Scott Blackman in Patterns for College
  Writing 5th ed.)
• With the grease pencil, label one slide Rh, and
  place this slide under the low-heat source.
  Divide your cool slide into two equal sections,
  labeling one side A and the other B. Apply one
  drop of anti-A serum to slide A, one drop of
  anti-B to slide B, and one drop of anti-Rh to the
  warm Rh slide.

• Objective writing
• presents the facts. The language is precise and
  unemotional.

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The Scholars Study

• (from Academic Discourse Community or
  Communities? by David R. Russell in Critical
  Strategies, 2nd ed.)
• Because it is tempting to recall academias very
  different past and hope for a very different
  future, the term academic community has powerful
  spiritual and political connotations, but today
  academia is a discourse community only in a
  context so broad as to have little meaning in
  terms of shared linguistic forms, either for the
  advancement of knowledge (which now goes on in
  disciplinary communities and subcommunities) or
  for the initiation of new members (who are
  initiated into a specific communitys discourse).
  Thus, to speak of the academic community as if
  its members shared a single set of linguistic
  conventions and traditions of inquiry is to make
  a categorical mistake. In the aggregate of all
  the tightly knit, turf-conscious disciplines and
  departments, each of its own discourse community,
  the modern university consists. Many have wished
  it otherwise.

• Objective and Subjective Writing
• Analysis and Synthesis

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The Seekers Notebook

• Flower in the Crannied Wall
• Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you
  out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and
  all, in my hand,
  Little flowerbut if I could understand
  What you are, root and all,
  and all in all, I
  should know what God and man is.
  (Alfred Lord
  Tennyson--1809-1892)
  

• Subjective and Objective Writing
• Analysis and Synthesis
• Expression and Exploration

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Think about how a writer might use the following

• Opinions Feelings
• Facts Examples
• Critical thinking Reflection
• Interpretation Analysis and synthesis
• Deductive and inductive logic
• Plan for organization
• Strong command of English grammar and style

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Considerations

• Purpose
• Audience and setting
• Your writing role

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Thats all for now!