Eric Lynch

ENC1102
8/30/2020

Question 3: From the time that I was old enough to take standardized testing until I was a
freshman in high school, every single essay that I was instructed to write had to be 5
paragraphs. It did not matter what school I attended (which there were numerous) or what the
subject of the essay was, I was told that it had to be 5 paragraphs in length by my teachers, or
else it would not be graded as highly on the rubric. However, once I had gotten to my freshman
year of high school and the majority of my standardized testing on English was completed, my
teacher, for the first time, told me, and made me realize, that an essay does not have to be 5
paragraphs in length in order to be good or in order to obtain a good grade on it. In fact, my
English teacher during freshman year didn’t even use a rubric that cared about the length of the
essay. Instead, he used something called an “un-rubric” to grade our work. Which instead of
focusing on our grammar and word count, solely focused on if we had effectively got our point
across and if the writing was appropriate for the intended audience. Although, it has really been
hard to adapt to that model so far since, “how and why you write, what you think about writing,
and how you make sense of texts are all impacted by all that you've done and
experienced.”(Wardle, Elizabeth. ​Writing about Writing.​ Bedford Books St. Martin's, 2016, pp.
8.) And since the majority of my life so far has been using a single format for writing, it is still
ingrained in me in some sense.

Question 1: One thing that I have never really been comfortable about when writing is knowing
how to write for the intended audience of my work. The majority of my work has solely been for
testing purposes, in which my writing was sent to some random location to a random person just
to essentially be graded on my grammar and format. The only other writing I have really done
extensively was for my teachers, who I got to spend many weeks and many opportunities to
learn what they expected of me for my work. At the moment, I would be uncomfortable with
writing for an audience that I only know at a superficial level as I worry that they would not get
what I was talking about or what the intended message of my work was. I hope to, in the future,
hone in the ability to create a rhetorical reading, using exigence, which, “emphasizes the way
that human interaction depends on context or situation.”(Wardle, Elizabeth. ​Writing about
Writing​. Bedford Books St. Martin's, 2016, pp. 26.) By being able to understand and write for my
intended audience, they would be able to understand/comprehend my work.