Generally speaking, no, I don’t really know why I write. I’ve got too many conflicting answers that I think are all good enough to really offer just one. In a sense, I am wearing, oh so many hats as a writer. But for this piece, I’ll explain why I do, chronologically.
I feel like most of us are taught to think of writing, at first, as a response to literature. If I’m alone with that one, don’t worry, I’ll let myself out. But for the most part, I think that’s fair to say. It only makes sense to start out having ideas about other people’s ideas first, right? Seems a natural progression.
And by the time I came to school, I still held that stance. It was definitely present in one of my papers freshmen year. I wrote a comparative analysis, a FYWR staple, about The Dark Knight and The Grand Inquisitor. It was a piece inspired by, and directly stolen from, a bunch of fan theories/comments you can find all over the internet. It was effectively a commentary on a comparison that someone else already made. But still, arguably clever, and hardly original - I was proud of it. This was probably the first time I had fun writing. Not sure why yet, but I know it got the ball rolling.
Beyond that, I didn’t have much experience with writing before this class. Don’t read all that much for pleasure either, so that certainly doesn’t help. From what I do read, I use to help improve my writing. To me, being well read is an effective and socially acceptable, if not respected, way to plagiarize better writers. So after writing that paper, I started to read more critically - asking why something is written how it is.
I learned a lot using this method during an internship last summer. Not from the content of the job, I was just on Reddit a lot, killing time. I’ve learned a great deal from reading Reddit comments. Each being made for a different purpose, with different syntax, part of a certain conversation. I’ve seen lengthy, formal and articulate posts make a point as effectively as crass, misspelled, trolling replies written in multiple fonts and formats. The point is that the motivation is the same, but the execution what differs. And this idea of addressing how someone writes is what helped.
This really started to develop throughout the experimentation process. I took my original text, a speech about family leave, and reworked it in different genres to better understand their affordances and limitations. I chose that speech because it seemed most appropriate, with its nifty, academic tone and feel. That’s just what I thought good writing should look like and talk about for some reason.
My first round went fine. I wrote something that resembled a Daily Show bit. I still don’t know what it was exactly. This choice was inspired by the hours of research that I put into the original speech (a.k.a. watching Last Week Tonight’s bit on paid leave). I got to crack some one-liners and drop some useful statistics. I tried being funny and informative, to make it more palatable. I don’t think that worked out as I had hoped.
I followed up by making an infographic. Seemed fitting for the circumstance. They’re usually informative, to some degree. Infographics explain things like carbon footprint using some neat visuals. But this round didn’t feel like much of a departure from the original text. I just couldn’t get rid of the emotionless, dreadful vernacular that you see in discussing political issues.
So to diverge from the beaten path, I went for a blog next. Blogs are supposed to be very intimate and emotional. And I tried to leverage that. I used emotional appeal to try to reach out to the unphased audience member and have them take what I said to heart. This experiment helped me understand how writing with emotion is useful, but also complicated - it can clutter things. Writing in blogs, compared to other genres, has issues regarding formality and credibility. In my blog post, I had trouble being informative and emotional without ranting.
And so by now, I think I have a better, or at least different, understanding of writing. This experimentation process makes me think of writing more as a series of choices. I wrote about the same topic, catering to different styles and audiences that determined my delivery. I was guided by my genre of choice, prompting specific diction, syntax, tone, pace, structure and so forth depending on my audience’s expectations.
And as I’ve used this ideology more, I’ve begun to see writing as a medium for reflection. Considering writing to be a series of choices, it’s good metacognitive practice to watch yourself write. Also, rereading your old writing can be fun. At some point, you thought what you wrote was, more or less, good. That says something.
I like to think my writing has improved. Not that it’s like, “Now I’m done with this process of learning. Here I am, hero resolved!”. No, but I have a better idea of what I have to do moving forward. If this process gave me anything, it’s a willingness to try, fail, make a mess of everything, but at least learn while doing it.