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Chase Rice

ENC-1101

20 November 2019

A Change In Style

For me writing has always been a long, arduous process that takes hours and hours of me

staring at a blank piece of paper or computer screen before I finally get a couple words down.

This began at a young age (kindergarten-elementary school) when my mom would have me sit

down at the dining room table and do all my work there with no distractions (video games,

music, TV) and I could not leave before I finished every single assignment. I would dread the

days I had an essay to write because I knew I would have to sit still for hours. This never worked

for me as I had a very active imagination and instead of writing I would stare into nothingness

just thinking about wild scenarios and crazy inventions, instead of the prompt. As I got older

(middle school) and could finally do work at my own pace in my room writing did not get any

easier or more enjoyable for me, I still could not use a phone, or watch tv, or listen to music at

any point in between my writing or as I was writing. This led to the same result as me sitting in

the dining room, staring for hours and getting nothing done, the only difference was the location

I was sitting in. This changed drastically when I entered high school. With less and less

restrictions from my mom and the constant increase in the technology available to kids I was

able to write in a vastly different way than in previous years. I would kick my feet up with some

snacks and my phone next to me to allow for occasional breaks and a more relaxed time. While I

still struggled with writing and did not enjoy the process the ability to go in and out of it freely

made it easier for me than years prior. Now as a college student having to write more papers than

ever before and with total freedom the number of distractions I have around me seems to
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increase every time I have to write a paper. While my previous papers for this class have been

written in my usual casual way, for this paper I am going to try and establish an improved

writing style. I will discuss the benefits and flaws of my usual writing style and then discuss how

I am working to improve it based on what I have learned in our assigned readings.

For previous papers in ENC1101 I would have my TV on, loads of snacks surrounding

me, multiple tabs open on my computer with games and YouTube videos, and a football and

basketball to mess with while I stare at the screen. This allows me to enjoy the process more

because I can stop whenever I want and think about what else I will write while doing something

else. This helps me to finish a long essay or research paper and not completely hate the process.

However I feel like it may have a negative influence on the actual quality of my writing as I am

not entirely focused on the work and how effectively my message is being conveyed. This class

and the readings have got me to rethink how I write and begin to try and become a better writer,

and the reading in particular that made me consider how my environment and the distractions

around me may influence my writing was Carol Berkenkotter’s “Decisions and Revisions: The

Planning Strategies of a Publishing Writer”. In her paper she discusses her research on Donald

M. Murray and his writing process. What was interesting about this research was how it focused

on not taking a writer out of their natural environment into a laboratory or other research setting

because of the effects a different setting could have on the writer. She states in her paper. "When

researchers remove writers from their natural settings (the study, the classroom, the office, the

dormitory room, the library) to examine their thinking processes in the laboratory, they create a

context of a powerful sort, often deeply affecting what is being observed and assessed”

(Berkenkotter 156). This got me thinking how does the way I consistently change my writing

circumstances and move from location to location effect the quality of my writing? In response
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to this I have made an effort to at least keep my space consistent while I write. While I am not at

the point where I can completely eliminate distractions, I can at least try and keep them

consistent, instead of listening to a playlist on shuffle or a random tv show I can select the same

songs or shows so they will be associated with me having to write. Along with this I can

schedule breaks for food, to use my phone, or just to wander around. This should keep me more

focused as I write because I know a break is coming soon and just need to keep working a little

longer.

Another aspect of my usual writing process that I am working to improve is how I

mentally view writing and how I approach individual works I do. One of the biggest issues I

have before I start a paper stems from how I view myself as a writer. I consider myself a very

math and science-oriented person, numbers and figures take me little to no time at all to learn but

trying to learn about rhetoric and rhetorical devices is like trying to learn another language for

me. This has always caused me to stress about my papers and feel that they will not be good

enough and that I will not get the grade I want regardless of how hard I try. Thinking this way

basically ensures that I would struggle with every piece I did and nearly failing an English course

in highschool only went farther to reinforce that idea. After reading Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First

Drafts” my feelings towards writing changed, while my first paper may be terrible even maybe

my second third and fourth revisions, eventually with enough effort I could write a good paper.

She explains this by saying “Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is

the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them” (Lamott 1). Knowing that even

professional writers have trouble creating great pieces immediately made me reevaluate how I do

things. Instead of just spewing every word that comes to my mind onto a page I can do that as a
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rough pre-write, take the chunks that I think are good and elaborate upon them until I have a

working draft to continue to improve on even further.

The last thing I will work to improve is my use of technology (computers, phones, etc.) to

write. There is nothing inherently wrong with writing with technology, and there is not even a

choice a lot of the time; however, the way I generally use it gets me off topic way more than I

should be and keeps me from finishing my paper in a reasonable amount of time. Generally, I

will have multiple “escapes” available with a single click whether it be a game, a video, or a

form of social media I have things constantly available to get me off track. This would get me off

track for hours at a time because once I got preoccupied with something other than writing I did

not want to go back to it. I never even considered this because of how innate distractions are to

forms of technology such as computers, I had no intention to stop writing but as soon as I got off

track it was nearly impossible to get back on. The reading that got me to think about this was

Dennis Baron’s “From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies” in it he discusses

how computers changed writing as well as how it is just another shift in technology, just one

with more capabilities. Considering this all I must do to take advantage of the benefits computers

provide without getting off topic is to have the articles I will use up before hand and keep all

other tabs closed so everything is related to my immediate goal.

For the other two papers we have written for ENC1101 (the narrative and the analytical

paper) my writing style was how it was described in the beginning of this paper, very casual and

constantly changing. This class and specifically the readings previously discussed have got me to

think about how I write and the ways I can improve it, which is what I tried to do for this paper.

The methods I discussed to improve where ones I thought about prior to starting this paper and

then enacted in hopes to improve the clarity and quality of my paper in the end. Overall I found
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the process to be more challenging than the other papers but if it improves my writing then it

would be an easy trade-off.

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Citations

Baron, Dennis. From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies. Passions,

Pedagogies, and 21st. Century Technologies,

http://faculty.las.illinois.edu/debaron/essays/pencils.htm.

Berkenkotter, Carol, and Donald M. Murray. “Decisions and Revisions: The Planning Strategies

of a Publishing Writer, and Response of a Laboratory Rat: Or, Being

Protocoled.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 34, no. 2, 1983, pp. 156–

172. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/357403.

Lamott, Anne. "Shitty First Drafts.” Language Awareness: Readings for College Writers. Ed. by

Paul Eschholz, Alfred Rosa, and Virginia Clark. 9th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s,

2005: 93-96.