I changed schools annually as a child, but there was something about St. Sylvester School in Brooklyn, NY. It was my favorite. In its ancient, funky charm, St. Sylvester’s opened me to a world of new circumstances, including writing in cursive. Fresh, blank manuscript workbooks were distributed monthly. It’s an old story for Catholic school kids: You attend mass every Tuesday morning and you lug around a 2-pound- manuscript workbooks. When Mrs. Belen plopped the workbook in front of me, hearts appeared in my eyes and my tongue lulled out my mouth, Looney Tune style. I had already developed a love for manuscript and writing from my previous year at catholic school, but this time I felt evolved. I completed every assignment with precision, becoming quite fond of the swirly letters of cursive. My 7-year-old mind considered writing cursive an art—I practiced my craft with passion. From then on, my love for physically writing turned into a love for the writing of all styles. Over time, I have been able to learn certain strategies that help make my writing process more elaborate. Throughout the semester, we have learned about several key rhetorical terms that were meant to develop our writing skills, however, in developing my theory of writing, the rhetorical terms that have helped me the most are the audience, purpose, medium, stance, and language.
In my writing process, these strategies have helped me form a proper voice. It is also helpful that several of these strategies go hand in hand. For example, audience and language correspond in the same nature, as the audience helps me decide, as a writer, what language is best to use. For my Two Genre Composition, my target audience was adolescents, so I knew that I would be able to use modern lingo and be confident that they would be able to comprehend. I also found that when I determined the purpose of my writing, I was able to easily conjure a thesis and outline for whatever I was writing, mostly because I knew my intentions.
The medium was a strategy that I was previously familiar with through art lessons, but it never registered that it could be also applied to writing. Throughout the semester, our class was given a chance to engage in various mediums of writing, which was extremely helpful. The New York Times Op-Eds are a perfect example, as many of the authors featured displayed a charming, unique writing style. Choosing a specific medium for some of the writing assignments was interesting because it let us stray away from the typical essay format of writing.
Things changed in middle school when I was conditioned to never use the word “I” in an academic essay. I would drool every time I wrote a sentence that started with “I”. Eventually, I became properly trained and never used the word in my writing. Although, I did become particularly uncomfortable with using my voice in my writing. In this class, we were presented examples of writing that held academic format and still used the word “I”. I was introduced to writers who used jokes and other non-formal techniques in their writing, which made me more comfortable in exploring my writing capacity. The idea that I can evolve my writing and express my thoughts in various ways makes me feel like I am back in Mrs. Belen’s class receiving my chunky manuscript textbook.
