February 17 - Composition Process and Teaching

This week we wrote a 5 to 6 page paper about our composing process. To be honest, I wasn't sure of what I had to say about my own composing process. I had always just thought about it as a slow and arduous process of trying to actually get myself to sit down at the computer and get started. Before starting, I thought about what I was going to say and for the first time, realized that I had a different composing process for every type of writing that I engage in. I had never even thought of how I compose emails, which actually probably makes up the bulk of my everyday writing. This turned out to be a very interesting exercise, because it forced me to think about how I write in many different situations, how these differ, and even how I can improve some of my processes. For example, I realized that I didn't really have a good process of writing emails and that I should start treating them like academic papers. Not to extensively plan them, but just to jot down a few key points and then start writing from there. I plan to try this out for a little bit and see how it goes. Different documents need to have different composing processes, but each process potentially has something to offer my writing process in general.