Written on May 12, 2025
Sometimes I write sitting on the right side of the dining table, other times lying stomach-down on the living room carpet or in bed with the diffuser on and the lights turned low. Sometimes I write to ambient music. Other times I require utter silence. I always write ideas and outlines on physical paper. But I type my drafts. This semester, I discovered another condition tied to my ability to compose: I need to write in completely unformatted documents using editors in light mode. Oddly specific. I know.
That is not the only discovery I made this semester. What follows is a candid assessment and reflection of my growth as a writer over the last few months.
The Rhetorical Situation
One of the first ideas we learned about in class was the Rhetorical Situation, a framework for understanding the context of a composition centering on analyzing the purpose and audience of a piece of communication. Throughout the course, I kept returning to the framework and found myself increasingly asking myself these questions: Who is my audience? What is my message? What is the best strategy for effectively conveying my message to my audience?
Social Iterative Writing
For most of my academic career, writing has gone like this: I composed a piece. My professor graded it. I reviewed their comments. We moved on to the next assignment. It was a linear process, where I, the writer, never reengaged with a piece after submission. I avoided drafting, wanting to “get it right” on the first try. But drafting was part of every major assignment in this course. We were also required to post our unfinished pieces to public spaces where other eyes would see them. Understandably, I was horrified, uncomfortable with publicizing work that was far from complete.
But I had no choice. I nervously shared my first rough draft of the course, which was a lab report. It had many weaknesses, the most apparent of which was its nearly nonexistent introduction. That week, my peers reviewed my draft, and I reviewed theirs. While students produce many compositions over the course of their academics, they rarely get the opportunity to reach each other’s work, and I enjoyed observing my peers’ unique writing styles and providing what I hoped was helpful feedback. By the end of the week, my professor and peers had finished reviewing my draft.
Here are their comments:
I read their comments, compiled them into a master to-do list, and began working on the next draft. Thanks to my reviewers’ suggestions, my introduction was much better the second time around. In this way, the course created a social writing environment where every student both gave and received feedback and everyone learned from each other.
The lab report changed my mind about a few things. I decided drafting was actually a beneficial practice and sharing rough work was not as dreadful as I thought it would be. I was incredibly grateful for my professor’s and peers’ comments and pointers. Their combined observations and critiques on my rough draft’s strengths and weaknesses helped me develop a strong final draft of my lab report.
Here are the rough and final drafts for 3 of my major compositions:
I am a computer science major. Iterative development is a core part of modern software development. The point is to work in tight feedback loops, ship products early and often, and continuously improve. The first release of a product is never perfect. It is just minimally viable. The goal is to test the approach and collect feedback from users to improve the product. Because I support this approach for writing code, I find it humorous that it took me so long to embrace iterative writing (aka drafting) as a useful tool for natural language compositions.
Writing Tactics
Beyond drafting, I made other additions to my writing process.
Early in the course, I gained a writing reconnaissance tool after being tasked with finding and annotating two lab reports, taking note of their structure, style, and content. It showed me that learning about new genres begins with the careful examination of examples. Also, the genres we explored in class illustrated the utility of multimodal elements in written compositions. I started using graphs, images, diagrams, and tables in my work to aid comprehension and organize large volumes of data.
I developed the practice of reducing writing prompts and assignment descriptions to skeletal forms, preserving key phrases and requirements to help me focus on core writing outcomes. It helped me perform an initial task analysis and has become an integral part of my process.
While I have always been a huge advocate of outlining, my style has become much more flexible over the semester. For short pieces, I wrote from quick notes. For longer compositions, I used what I call “loose outlines.” Loose outlines do not have a strict, predefined structure. Their main purpose is to organize information just enough to support the writing process. Whether working from quick notes or loose outlines, I usually cross items off as I write to track my progress.
When I had trouble getting words on the page, I found it helpful to forget about writing “in order” and start wherever there was least resistance. Once I overcame the inertia, it was easier to continue writing. I kept following low resistance levels rather than outline order until I had all the content I needed on the page. While this strategy usually required more work to transform the initial content into a reasonable final draft, it ensured I was making progress. From there I iterated until I got to a point where I could give the composition the label “final draft.”
Routine Reflection
I will admit that I was impartial about the required self-grading reflections we needed to do for each assignment. But they became a valuable exercise I leveraged to understand my own work objectively. Most of the time I feel unhappy with my compositions although if someone asked me to explain what exactly I was dissatisfied with, I would find it difficult to articulate. Writing reflections for each major assignment forced me to distance my emotions from my work and critically assess whether I met the objectives and identify areas where I had done well or could improve. The reflections made me realize that my instinctive evaluation of my writing was emotional rather than logical. While I still feel unsatisfied, I can more objectively evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of my work.
This course has helped me develop as a writer in multiple ways, exposing me to new genres and influencing my writing process. I developed a sharper awareness of my writing’s context, adopted the practice of iterative composition, formulated new writing tactics, and gained an appreciation for the benefits of regular reflection on my work. Since nearly every piece of writing produced in class was posted to a shared discussion board, I came to realize that writing is not a solitary process, but a very social one. Through class readings, podcasts, and videos, I learned about the importance of writing precisely and concisely while maintaining completeness and organization, especially in engineering disciplines. While I did not make progress in the areas of research and source integration, my current ability is sufficient for my assignments.
A wise person once told me, “There is always room for improvement.” It is a statement that is hard to rebut. I have evolved as a writer this semester. But I have a long way to go. It is my intention to keep writing, reflecting, and improving.
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