Think of something you're really good at. For me, that's being inordinately passionate about birds. And while, yes, I was born to be a bird whisperer, there are very few things that we're instantly good at.
And even the stuff we're good at, we probably still have room for improvement. Like I still don't know how to actually speak bird. But sometimes we decide things about ourselves that might not even be true, or we never update the story.
Like as writers, if we ask ourselves, am I a writer? or even, am I a good writer, we tend to find one answer and stick with it. If we decide we're bad writers, we might not recognize that we're actually fairly complex as people and as writers, or use it as an excuse to stop trying because we'll never improve.
Though deciding we're good writers can be just as damaging, once we decide we've got a skill mastered, we can think we know all there is to know and accidentally stop trying to grow and learn. Understanding ourselves as writers is much more involved than we might think. Writing happens in a wide variety of contexts, and rather than just being one skill, it's a bunch of different skills. Hi, I'm Dr. Emily Zarka, and this is Study Hall Rhetoric and Composition. Whether we think we're good or bad writers, or something in between, if we want to become better writers, we have to get a complete picture of our writing in the past.
Lots of us accidentally get stuck with an incomplete mindset about who we are as writers, and it can hold us back from reaching our potential. So a great way to start pulling apart the different strands of our writing lives is to think about different kinds of writing as sets of literacies. People often think of literacy as just the ability to read. But we can be literate in any particular knowledge or ability. Like computer literacy means someone knows their way around using a laptop or desktop.
And other things like bird skills, coffee-making techniques, or landscaping methods are all literacies in their own right. And whether it's coffee-making or landscaping or something else, most things we think of as a single literacy are actually a bunch of skills that we grow in tandem as we work toward greater knowledge and ability. And you might be wondering why we're spending so much time talking about literacies when we're supposed to be working on writing.
Well, one key factor about literacy is that we can grow to a certain level of mastery or become highly skilled. But we can also continuously improve even after we reach a high level. So we don't just become literate in an instant and hold onto that mastery forever. Like even with reading, people don't magically learn how to read everything. Even years in, you'll run into new words and ways of writing.
And depending on what we're reading, there are many separate skills we'll need to bring to the table. Like we need different skills to read a scientific report from a laboratory than to close-read historical texts the way a medieval literature professor would. So we can think of writing as its own literacy, too.
And that means that under the writing umbrella, there are all sorts of skills that help make us writers, no matter what writing experience we've had before. But in order to figure out what skills we need to work on, we need to think back. Carefully reviewing our past experiences and what we're doing now can show us where we've already started our literacy journeys, and where we're still beginners. Let's look first at an area of writing that most people have run into at one point or another. Writing for school.
School teachers have a challenging task ahead of them in writing class, because they want to teach us writing strategies that will be relevant for the rest of our lives. But they also have to evaluate us. And that can make the skills we're learning feel distant from the real world. Like, many people in the US learn to write five-paragraph essays in school, where there's an introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion paragraph. But many people get discouraged as writers because they're better at individual elements of writing, like using really interesting word choice or writing really clear sentences, and not as good as following the five-paragraph essay formula.
And there are probably other types of writing in our past that we excelled at or struggled with. Overall, school writing helps us establish some basics, but developing a complex view of school writing and its effect on our writing history can help us let go of believing there's one correct kind of writing. And help us let go of the five-paragraph essay method.
Because there were probably moments where we didn't succeed at a school writing task because, say, we were distracted by the kid in front of us playing The Sims and just missed the instructions, And having a complex view of school writing also acknowledges that there were other factors at play making writing challenging, like implicit bias, which is some preference or aversion to something that we're not conscious we have. It also helps to decide what parts of those assignments or experiences still show up when we examine our present writing. Like I write all the time, and everything I write has an introduction, some kind of statement of purpose, paragraphs that explain the purpose, and a conclusion.
including this script you're watching right now. But I can't remember the last time I wrote a specifically five-paragraph essay. Workplaces or even specific fields can also hold up particular kinds of writing as correct. Like, maybe your boss goes on and on about short sentences as the biggest concern in documents.
Even if there are bigger issues to address, you learn that your particular boss is going to focus on this, and it's worth just reworking those sentences given this context. That's just one example. but most workplaces operate under some assumptions about writing, like that all of our writing should focus on selling, selling, selling. Or they might think that all our writing should be precise and full of dense technical terms, even if we're not writing for an audience who has that know-how. So just like in school we simplified writing into five-paragraph formulas, in every workplace writing context, we'll be invited to believe simplifications, like writing is for memos only, or writing well isn't as important as new technical products for our clients.
There are things we can learn from these simplifications about different writing skills, but they aren't the single, simple truth about writing. In fact, there's another context besides school and work where we are constantly improving our writing, even if we don't see it that way all the time. Our everyday personal life involves a lot of writing and a lot of complex writing literacies.
Like, if you have to hustle two kids out of the house quickly, your note to a spouse might be only 10 words long and still convey where you're going, what you need from the grocery store, and when you'll be home, all while strengthening an emotional bond between you. That's an incredibly sophisticated writing task. Or, if you're helping a family member get the medical care they need, you may be writing long emails and filling out complex forms for multiple healthcare providers, insurance providers, and other family members.
You're having to make sure you all understand the plan and how it will change given certain conditions, all while keeping a written record to share if you need to loop someone new in. Or if you're building a following for your fashion-focused Instagram, you're probably becoming adept at noticing which photos and captions draw in dozens of likes, and which ones languish without even a single comment from your followers. You're taking in and processing all kinds of complex information about what your audience wants to see.
So when we compile a writing history, we're drawing out the kinds of writing we've done in the past and what we learned from those experiences. We start to identify ourselves much more effectively than if we say good or bad and leave it at that. And we can build on what we learned in school or work or just by being out in the world and extrapolate a few principles that we're going to return to over and over in this course and even in life. First, not all writing is an essay form. Emails, tweets, texts, sticky notes, letters delivered by homing pigeons, and more are all forms or genres of writing.
Next, writing is a set of skills that are learned, practiced, and continually improved—not something that we're either born able to do or are just incapable of achieving. And finally, when we're mastering the building blocks of English grammar, it's easy to get the idea that good writing means good grammar. Teachers who are trying to help us navigate the dizzying complexities of English grammar can end up discounting the many dialect differences in English. They want us to have the tools to communicate broadly, but sometimes that means focusing on a single, rules-focused way of learning. This can particularly be an issue for non-native English writers, writers from rural or southern areas, and Black Americans who regularly use African American Vernacular English.
And while, yes, we want to be clear and knowing grammar rules helps us do that, we can look at language more complexly as we progress in our writerly journeys. Communities of English language writers use different vocabulary and sentence structures, so if our community's English usage was different from our teachers', we might have gotten the impression that we weren't good at writing. But in reality, we were working across dialect differences and doing some serious translation work.
To understand how remembering these three principles empowers us to improve, let's look at an example. Detective Benedict Writerbatch started his investigation of his own ability as a writer when taking an intro class in college. Cough.
He was convinced he was a weak writer and tried to look back and deduce how that had happened. Turns out, as a kid he'd entered a contest with a judge who prioritized grammar only. A comment about the grammar in his essay, along with a low grade, cemented it for him. He'd have to figure out a different path and maybe make a living as an investigator, even though communications was his first love. But that wasn't the whole story.
In class, Detective Reiterbach was encouraged to look for other clues, and as he journaled about his past and present, he discovered new, more complex truths. He remembered how his boss working at a summer camp really valued his ability to post engaging photos and notes on social media that helped parents feel like their kids were safe and having a great time at the camp. And he remembered how great last year's family reunion turned out because he was able to write clear, bullet-list-filled emails that helped everyone make decisions about where to go and what to do on a reasonable budget.
He even remembered a different writing context, where he was applying for college, working with his guidance counselor to really understand the requirements for a particular essay resulted in a scholarship offer. Of course, Benedict can still take into account the opportunity to dig into grammar more as he moves forward. He can look for tools like grammar checkers to help him figure out which grammar issues are tripping him up. But grammar isn't the whole story of his writing life.
So if writing and different types of writing are all sets of literacies, then we can get better at them, no matter what we've thought about our writing selves in the past. It's really liberating to realize our potential for growth. Because we're always writing something, be it personal, school, or workplace writing, We've got lots of examples to draw from as we dive into more techniques, tools, and strategies for writing more effectively.
Our stories about who we are as writers aren't set in stone. New stories are available to us whenever we're ready to uncover new aspects of our writing experiences and chart a new path forward. Thanks for watching Study Hall Rhetoric and Composition, which is part of the Study Hall Project, a partnership between ASU and Crash Course. If you liked this video and want to keep learning with us, be sure to subscribe.
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