A Welcome to Students

In the Beginning

All writing begins and ends in reflection. Whether remembering a childhood moment, reacting to a newspaper article, or writing a college paper, writers reflect on events, people, places, and ideas. The reflection gives rise to impulses, which gradually take the shape of words, which represent attempts to evoke, to describe, to explain, to evaluate, and to persuade.  As writers shape their thoughts, they locate themselves in a time, place, and culture, giving the readers clues to their whereabouts and using these clues to guide their next thoughts. This locating and restructuring occurs throughout the writing of the piece and long after the piece is finished as the writer's readers seek their own meanings, and the writers write anew.

As reflection is a messy and difficult process, sometimes leading to unexplored terrain, writers have developed signposts to assist them in completeing the writing task. These signposts consist of everything from abstract rhetorical considerations, such as purpose and audience, to step-by-step methods for producing flawless prose, such as editing and proofreading. This course will introduce you to the most common considerations and methods for developing your writing with the goal of creating a framework that will allow you to tackle future academic writing.

The Writing Process

Each assignment introduces activities that lead you through the writing process, tradtionally defined as inventing, probing, generating, drafting, revising, editing and proofreading. Each act includes at least one other, and it is not uncommon to repeat one act in the process of performing another. In other words, we draft as we invent, we revise as we generate, we generate as we edit, and we often return to previous parts of the text to revise, generate and edit once again. Experienced writers have developed a sense of when, where, and how to perform these acts. Novice writers must experiment to achieve confidence in their choice of approaches. The exercises in this site are designed to help you to develop a sense of your own writing processes and to discover the most productive way to engage in a writing task.

Before you start into the course, take a look around and get familar with the site and take a guided tour to see how the different parts of the course work.