Chapter 2 Study Guide

1). Why study writing?

In my opinion, we study writing for two reasons, the first is to continue to improve the writing skills that we have already acquired and used every day. The second is to learn and understand new concepts and types of writing that have developed over time and by doing so rendering ourselves better prepared to communicate in different situations.

2). which of the two stories about writing from pp.1-29 do you think is the more accurate and why?

The first story, or as Writing about Writing calls it, “the traditional story”, talks about writing as we all learned it in school. This focuses on grammar, sentence structure, and proper punctuation, without a focus on content. This story is all about following the rules and not

What I found was that this story was very accurate on how I was taught to write. It really wasn’t about the content of what I wrote, it was about the rules and the mistakes that I made while writing. For someone beginning to learning to write, I believe this is the most accurate way to provide a foundation to build from.

If we didn’t have a basic set of rules to follow then how we would question them, break them, and eventually build from them.

The second story is about the journey we take to identifying the appropriate type of writing for a specific situation. It includes the process of writing content, without consideration of filtering that content through grammatical rules. This enables a meaningful message for the intended reader. For example, when we write text messages, the content we intend to provide transcends the format in which we provide it. We might communicate with bad spelling, emoji, non-standard abbreviations (e.g., U, R, instead of “You” and “Are”), yet our message is conveyed.

This story is less about the foundation of writing and its set rules we learned in school, and more about the content we are writing