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Nick McAndrew

Jan Rieman

English 1101 X

April 8th, 2010

Renewable Resources

In chapter one of Writing Conventions, Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner write that writing

is a process. Composing and the writing of a paper, for most people, may include very complex

thoughts, recursive movements and many eraser marks! In chapter one, they describe writing to

be an ever changing, non-stop process, where the changing of strategies and revising of a paper

is the heart of the final product. What Lu and Horner convey in this first chapter is that writing is

not meant to be an enclosed process; it should be a completely unpredictable and wide open

experience. Throughout chapter one Lu and Horner constantly portray the importance of

resources to pose and compose a good paper.

Writers are equipped with a set of skills due to their different abilities and what kind of

backgrounds that they have. These skills are called resources; resources can be where the writer

writes, what he/she writes on, what materials they have to write with, what they do, and even

past experiences. These resources are what make each paper different because every writer has a

different background.

Lu and Horner set up a hypothetical situation where they present examples of different

resources. Two students, Bill and Andrea are given a prompt and asked to give their opinion and

write on it. The prompt is: is it the media’s or the parent’s responsibility to protect children from

violence. Bill used his parents to help him as a resource, and wrote how the media was at fault.

Although Bill does not stick with this thesis, it shows that. Andrea, the other student, used her
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past experiences with the debate team as a resource. This resource helped her find additional

points for each side. In the end this method strengthened her argument that it was the media’s

responsibility to protect children from violence. This example shows the various resources

writers use so that they can produce and compose a well thought out paper. These various

resources bring out a whole range of actions and courses of actions at different points of the

composing process. Everyone has a different past than one another and draws from the various

experiences and events that have happened in their life. This is why no paper or writer is ever the

same. I in particular get my resources from the past literature that I have read and learned from.

Lu and Horner continue to portray that we as writers are also subject to interpretation.

The verbal and visual interpretations writers bring to a particular word often differ because of

their backgrounds as writers and individuals. Lu and Horner exclaim that because we all have

grown up with different surroundings words might mean something different to different people.

When one writes they must be aware of misinterpretation and try there best to make sure the

correct point is being made.

Other than individuals having different definitions for words, writers may take a word

and have a different understanding for it than another writer. Lu and Horner give the example of

having a thesis. It is certain that a thesis is an important strategy for a good paper, but it is not

certain when a writer should implement the thesis. Some writers cannot even start their papers

until they have a good thesis and some don’t even decide what their thesis is until they are

finished with the paper. This example reinstates the point that different strategies work for

different writers. For example I cannot write my paper until I have a concrete thesis. I have to

always plan out my entire paper through my thesis.

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This aspect of originality that Lu and Horner bring to the article is refreshing and brings

new information to readers that didn’t think of writing as a process before this article. I know

after reading this article I felt a new appreciation for my own style of writing and incorporated it

in with Lu and Horner’s method. What Lu and Horner do is provides a process of posing and

composing that helps keep the paper original and also well thought out. I can now take my

resources and past experiences in writing and mold all of them to produce a good paper.
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Works Cited

Horner, Bruce & Lu, Min-Zhan. "Composing Our Composing Processes." Writing

Conventions. Eds. Lu and Horner. New York: Pearson, 2008. 3-32. Print.

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Reflection

I feel like I made some major improvements on my paper from the first draft. The workshop

really helped me with the composing of my paper and really understanding how I write.

Although I have done a lot of work on it I can still work on my conclusion and try to form a few

better ideas with my critical interpretation. I also could have focused on more of the article, but I

still feel good about this paper. I really liked the “resources” aspect of this article so that’s why I

think I focused my thesis around it. What do you think?

Nick,

I’m glad that you found the workshop useful and that you gained further understanding

about how you write while working on this paper. The more you write, the more you know.

It’s a good idea to choose a narrow focus of your paper, as you do here, especially with

the word limit imposed by the assignment, so I think it works well for this paper. What I’d like

you to think about with revision is 1) adding in more personal experiences with these ideas to

show your reader how you relate to them with your own writing and 2)watching for those

nagging commas and small missing words and things that you missed on your final reading—so
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more careful proofreading. As you revise, you do not have to adhere to the word limit, so if you

want to expand this, you can.