Writing as a Conversation: Learning to Respond

For the majority of my educational journey, I have considered myself a good writer. I would always receive good marks with minimal criticism and critique. I developed great confidence in my writing, but often selfishly refused to take advice and criticism. This class served to demonstrate that our jobs as writers are never over and that revision and criticism are essential aspects of the literary process.

The most interesting aspect of this class was the way that our preconceived notions of writing were shattered. You reframed writing, not as a stand-alone piece of text, but instead as a small part of an ongoing conversation. It is here that the importance of critique and revision became apparent to me. If the true essence of writing is a conversation, then it is within the revision phase that the writer should enter into conversation with his own piece: meta-commentary. This is where I began to understand the power and importance of peer editing. An outside input can serve as a preliminary audience to help you test the effectiveness of your piece in the conversation. It is a forceful tool, whose effectiveness would not have been fully understood without this class. 

However, this class did not always need to revolutionize my views of writing to teach me something helpful. Before WRT-100 I had always been terrified of my rebuttals. I remember a particular instance in sixth grade that haunted me. I was writing an essay the night before it was due, as one does, and I discovered a counterargument that seemed far more powerful than my essay. I started freaking out and refused to even mention the counterargument. Through WRT-100’s recontextualization of writing as part of an ever-evolving conversation, I began to develop tangible methods to create an admirable rebuttal. One of the main methods was putting more emphasis on research and examining the topic as a whole, not only the sources that benefited my argument. This helped me immeasurably because the goal was no longer to ‘win’ my argument, but instead to flesh out my stance in the overarching conversation.