Why Study Writing?

Introducing Writing about Writing and Easy Writer

For this semester, we will be using two main textbooks to help guide your learning. Our main textbook will be the third edition of Writing about Writing. The title of the book sums up the focus of both the ENC 1101 and 1102 curricula, as our focus is on reading and writing about writing itself. The argument here is that if you want to become a more effective writer, you must study writing and how people use writing out in the real world. 

Our second required textbook will be the seventh edition of Easy Writer: A Handbook for the First-Year Writing Program at the University of Central Florida. You will be assigned various passages from this book across the semester to help you complete your homework and major papers, but you can also use this as a writing tool as you progress throughout the course. The table of contents at the beginning of the book can help you find sections dedicated to a variety of common writing concerns, including formatting, creating citations, introducing quotes, and learning about grammar (which will not be actively taught in the class). 

Ultimately, in this class, I will ask you to not only write, but to write about writing. This means that writing is not only what you are doing, but it is also the object of study. Everyone has their own ideas about writing. You’ve probably got your own ideas about writing, reading, and research that you’ve developed over the years, and they’re probably different than mine. They might even be different from your peers in this class. That’s fine, and, I’d argue, that’s part of what makes our work in a class like this pretty interesting. We’ll make sure we have plenty of time to discuss the assumptions you’re making, too, so think of the following as just the beginning of a semester-length conversation through which we all can, hopefully, learn some useful things about writing, reading, and research. 

Key Concepts about Writing

Across the semester, you'll see that the curriculum for ENC 1102 is founded on the following beliefs:

  • Writing expresses and shares meaning to be reconstructed by the reader.
  • Writing mediates activity.
  • Texts gain meaning from other texts.
  • Writers’ histories, processes, and identities vary, and these in turn inform how writers write, read, and research.
  • Discipline-/community-specific identities get enacted through writing.
  • Writers construct knowledge through writing in different genres. Genres are enacted by writers and readers with specific purposes and audiences.
  • Inquiry happens through writing in addition to research procedures. Research is constructed and shaped through different genres at different stages of the process, not only the final product/research paper/article.

Why Should We Study Writing? 

Matt Bryan, an Associate Lecturer here in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric, has created a helpful video below discussing why we would want to study writing, which might help explain what your research this semester will be like. Like any introductory course you might take, whether that's an intro to chemistry or intro to psychology course, our class is focused around introducing you to some key concepts and ideas related to writing that you can transfer to your future courses and professional life. Just like when you take an intro to chemistry course, nobody expects you to already be a chemist. Instead, they expect you to read about chemistry and see how other experts in the field have talked about and studied chemistry. Our course is an introduction to research writing, and that is what we will be studying and practicing. If you can learn to reflectively think about your own writing strategies, how to analyze other texts for writing strategies, when to use those strategies, and why you might use those strategies, you can use those skills in any future writing situation. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Psn52x1UNJw&feature=emb_err_woyt Links to an external site.

 

Examples of Student Work in ENC 1102 

I suggest checking out UCF's undergraduate journal, Stylus,  which publishes essays from ENC 1102 students like yourselves. Stylus will be a good example for you to draw from all semester. You can see all of the issues by clicking on the link above, but I am including some genre examples for this class specifically below.