Purpose of the Assignment: To learn about your writing process. To learn that you have a writing process that can be shaped and reshaped. To learn how to think about that process.
Intended Audience: Instructor. Classmates. Writing teachers. Scholars interested in studying the writing process.
Assignment Topic: What have you learned about yourself as a writer from studying the theory of the writing process and also collecting and analyzing your own data in light of this theory? Describe data that you collect about your writing process over the course of two weeks, then analyze the data to describe your writing process. Use the concepts and terms from the course readings to frame your analysis.
Assignment Description: For this assignment, I want you to examine your writing process and literacy influences and then reflect on your process and influences. You will write an essay describing your own writing process based on a) concepts you’ve learned from the course readings and b) data that you have collected about your writing process. You’ll use discussions and readings from this unit to write a 3-4 page analysis of what you learned from studying your writing process. The idea behind this paper is very similar to that of the Rhetorical Situation Assignment: read and learn what the parts of the writing process are, then compare your own writing process to what you’ve learned and write a paper that a) describes your own writing process using the theory you’ve learned and b) considers what shaped your writing process and how you might reshape it. (If you think about it, that is similar to the first paper, where you learned the parts of the Rhetorical Situation, then analyzed a text that you wrote and described the parts of the rhetorical situation of your text. The third and last paper for this class will also follow a very similar process.)
Step-by-Step Instructions:
1) TODAY, start creating some data about your writing process. You’ll keep this log for two weeks. You’re going to post the log and a list to a discussion forum/peer review two weeks from today. You’ll also be attaching your writing log to the end of your second essay, the Writing Process Assignment. It’s going to be one of the sources that you cite for this paper, along with the class readings. Make sure to keep up with it as it’s part of the final grade for the work for this paper.
Keep all of the answers to these questions in a journal or log. Keep as many notes about your writing process as you possible over the next week or two.
To get an idea of what to aim for and grading criteria:
Look over this sample final paper for an idea of what the paper could look like. (Link forthcoming.)
Look over the Evaluation Standards for The Writing Process Assignment