Nora's E-portfolio
ENC1102
Composing is made up of many parts - you have to start somewhere, and then you have to connect all the pieces to make it flow, and then you have to end it. To me, composing is what you do before you write. its the thought process written down on paper. You create an idea, or think of a way you want to respond to a prompt, and then you compose - list many ideas, how you want them to go, what you want to add to them, and how you want to explain them. Depending on your type of writing, 1 & 2 are interchangeable. When given a prompt, you already have your idea, and your audience, but you need to know what appropriate appeal to take in order to target the audience you have. If you’re writing a book, or free-writing, you choose your idea first, and then the audience is chosen by your idea, or you know who you want to write to, and therefore you need to choose a topic appropriately.
It was easy to know what’s appropriate for each drama for me. If I’m texting my friend, I’m not going to use proper grammar or spend time on niceties, especially in a situation where I’ve just crashed a car, missed an exam, and need a ride. Also, it’s easy to know that I would do the exact opposite in emailing a teacher. The entire situation was an exigency, an urgent matter that caused many problems that needed to be dealt with urgently. The genre was different for every scenario, for the professor, it was urgent to try and make up the exam, for the friend, it was urgent to be picked up. However, the exigency and genre are totally different in the blog post, journal, and essay. The blog post is more of telling a story rather than explaining or asking for help, and the journal entry is what we write to ourselves, no need to worry about impressing or asking for anything. The essay is comparing our situation to a psychological pattern. All are different.
For the professor, the purpose is to explain the situation in order to be able to make up an exam. Since your audience is an adult, who also has superiority over you, and is holding a class grade over your head, you speak properly. Correct grammar, not rude, and urgent. You explain and try to seem mature to make sure it is known that this was not an irresponsible mistake, even though it partly was. For when you text your friend to come pick you up, you quickly say, “I got in an accident. Can you come get me?” and give your coordinates. You are simply asking for a ride, and a fast one. You don’t worry about grammar, and they’re holding nothing over your head. You just simply need a favor, you don’t care if they think you’re irresponsible or a bad driver.
The audience changes what you write entirely. The journal entry is letting your feelings out, expressing your stress, not impressing anybody, not worrying about anybody reading it, just writing down for yourself. However, in the email, you’re explaining the situation, even more from a third party than from an emotional standpoint. You just want the professor to know what happened, how long it took, how sorry you are, and how badly you want to make up the midterm. The genre is completely different.
When writing an essay for a class, you’re usually given a prompt or a topic. Depending on your topic, you can figure out who your target audience is and what genre you want to use. This exercise gives you one topic, like a professor would, but it shows you that the topic can be directed in different ways depending on who you choose your audience to be. This exercise showed me the different freedoms I have, and the different scenarios I can choose if I ever have the liberty to choose my audience for a certain topic. It also showed me that even if a topic or scenario seems like it can only be directed towards a single audience, if you change the genre, or rhetorical situation, you can choose to direct it towards whichever audience you want.
I never thought of audience as being something that can inspire a writer. I learned that it is hard to write without knowing who your audience is, but Hooks doesn’t see it like that. Hooks doesn’t write a specific genre for a specific audience, but simply is able to write knowing there is an audience. I’ve never thought of it that way, and now that’s added a whole new explanation and understanding to the definition of audience. I like how he points out that a writer should be aware of AND ignore the audience. If a writer is too aware of the audience, their writing will be limited and not as good, however, if a writer completely ignores the audience, what if they receive no audience at all? He says in a clever way that you need a balance, write about what you want to write, but don’t forget about your audience, and always target your genre in a way that could target an audience that may not be interested in your topic. The photo essay was more of listing facts and targeting a certain audience and I had trouble becoming interested. The photo essay had a strict audience in mind and a strict genre that would only target certain people. It’s hard to see how these two essays intertwined, one is explaining audience and how you need to keep a balance, and one has a certain audience with no balance. The photo essay had a message to send, when the interview was really just Hooks answering questions about himself and his writing. I’m really glad we read the interview because it gave me a deeper understanding of audience.
Reflection (Re)Defining Audience
In-class Group Map of Composing
Idea of Composing at Beginning of Semester
Reflection on in-class Exercise
Initial idea of composing
Idea of composing after in-class assignment
My final map is completely different from my other maps, being that the last journal assignment made me think differently. I now believe that the order of key terms and which ones correlate more with each other is completely subjective. Howveer, one thing thats true is they all correlate with each other in one way, and they are all necessary in composing. I added images that i used throughout the semester of my different ways of composing to help understand better. This map shows that if you removed a term there would be a big empty hole, and it wouldn't look finished or be finished, which shows that each term is important.
Final Map
