Section 1.2: Writing
Developing good reading skills helps you to better understand and comprehend information being transmitted to you through words. Now think about this the other way around. If you want to transmit information to someone, you need to use words, and you also need to arrange and organize these words so that the person receiving your message in fact understands it.
Maybe it's important to stop and move backwards for a moment here. Ask yourself these two questions: Why do you write? What reasons do you have for writing?
Here are some possible reasons to consider:
- to communicate your ideas to someone else
- to better understand the world around you
- to tell stories
- to persuade
Think about the above list for a moment. Each of these reasons requires a different style of writing. You move from one to the other depending on your purpose for writing. Here's another example: the way in which you write a text message to a friend is very different from the way in which you'd draft a cover letter to be attached to your resume, which in turn would be very different from writing instructions about how to properly change a flat tire. These are three unique styles of writing. Each has its own set of rules to follow.
You can see from these three examples why writing can be challenging. If you've ever found writing challenging, or even difficult, don't worry, you're not alone in feeling this way. Even gifted writers, like an author, work at developing and honing their writing skills constantly. In a now famous example, the American writer Ernest Hemingway said to George Plimpton, a young writer at the time, that he had rewritten the ending to his novel A Farewell to Arms 39 times before he was satisfied with it. "Why so many times?" Plimpton asked. To which Hemingway replied, "Because I wanted to get the words right." Think about that for a minute - Hemingway rewrote a part of his novel (the ending) 39 times! Now that takes commitment.
While this may seem extreme, the point here is that good writing takes work, whether you are young or old, a student or a masterful writer. Developing strong writing skills now will be of great benefit to you in the future.
This section covers basic writing skills. This section will review writing modes, the writing process, the paragraph, and narrative and expository writing.
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