Theory of Writing
Writing is an important tool to express your opinions and thoughts to the world and it
can be used in a lot of powerful ways to change the world. A lot of people in the past did that
and the reason for its effectiveness is because it allows the writer to convey those thoughts
which may not be effectively conveyed in a speech. An effective writing involves various
techniques, and it should not be just based on simply writing your thoughts on a piece of paper.
There is no scale to determine whether someone can write effectively and produce some effect
on the reader, but few features can be the characteristics of effective writing. An effective
writing makes use of rhetorical appeals and various elements. These rhetorical appeals are used
to make things better and bring the ideas to reader in much more effective way. Rhetorical
appeals are so effective that some companies also use them to promote their products to
increase their sale.
Throughout this course, I learnt the stuff about writing that I did not learn in all my school life.
The most important things that I learnt and those will be effectively useful in my later career
are the rhetorical analysis and use of rhetor in writings along with how to conduct field
research. Particularly, later will be useful in my scientific career as I have plans to enter
scientific research and write research papers.
Before this project, I used to write to complete certain number of words or pages, but this
course changed the whole idea of writing for me. I realized writing is not just about putting out
your thoughts on a blank piece of paper, but it is about how effective can you make the things
for the reader and how much you can influence your writings. Particularly, rhetorical analysis
taught me that how people use the rhetor for wrong purposes sometimes like Hitler used it to
exterminate millions of Jews in WWII. So, instead of becoming the blind follower of someone,
one should have ability to understand that whether they are being encouraged for a wrong
thing by some inspiring lines or not.
All the writing tasks were challenging to some extent, but these challenges are important and
are needed to learn new things. Same thing happened with me in this course. I got a chance to
do a lot of projects and work on various topics and explore myself as a writer. Multimodality
project which was our first project helped me to understand different modes and how to make
a project effective by making use of different modes. Rhetorical analysis helped me to
understand that if we use our words in a certain way, they can create a big difference and have
a great impact on the reader’s mind. I learned about the different rhetorical appeals, their
purpose, and the right way to use them.
The third project was the most exciting as it led us to go and do our research. We conducted
out survey and read articles and learned how to use them and cite them in a way that our
research paper could be considered as an academic or scholarly journal. So, I overall helped us
a lot to understand the purpose of the primary research and methods to conduct the research. I
am quite confident as writer, and I hope that I will use a lot of knowledge from this course in
my future writing projects. Although I am STEM major, but most of these learnings about
writing will be directly useful in my future writing projects.
