My previous experience with “academic” writing is pretty basic. Any time that I did writing for classes the topics were always on a book or an academic topic. For example, I took English 167 and every paper that we wrote for that class was about a book that we had just read, have it be explaining the symbols in the book or comparing and contrasting two different books. Although in high school writing was a little different. I had a writing class my junior year titled “College Writing.” We had a big research paper for the basis of the class and my topic was how the roman goddesses’ cults and the Roman Empire helped Christianity evolve. We could pick whatever topic we wanted (I’m Jewish by the way). I think the best part about the class was that it was intended to prepare us for writing in college. The class has in a way prepared me, for example I know how to write compare and contrast papers and research and write large research papers, but I haven’t really done a lot of writing while at college. I have taken English 100 and 167, but that’s about it. In the classes for my major we don’t write a lot. What we do is pick a topic and then portray it in a way that doesn’t involve writing, like through printing and dyeing or fabric manipulation and embroidery.
I think that media challenges the concept of academic in writing based on how people research topics, how they go about writing and how their writing is made available. How one researches a topic has changed from when I was in high school. In high school we weren’t allowed to use sources from the internet, they all had to come from books. Now people source almost anything, like Wikipedia. By having the internet more available and many people having their own computer we have changed the way we research topics. Even one of my professors today told me to start researching on the internet first before trying to start at the library.
I think that this way of researching could be good, but does have some consequences. By starting with the internet we can get information fast and easy and will most likely start to understand our topic more so when we go to the library we can start looking for more specific books or articles. However, sometimes by starting with the internet and not looking at scholarly websites we might get the wrong idea for our topic or obtain false information.
Learning how to create a web page is an example of how we write academically has changed. In this class we will learn just that. I think that this is a great benefit of how new media has changed the standard “academic” writing. I may not write a 20 page research paper once I graduate but I will definitely use the skills of making a web page. For certain people knowing how to write a research paper will help them in their career, but for me personally I most likely will not use those skills.
“Academic” writing used to be available to professors, TAs or teachers and the public if it was published but now it could be available to anyone. This class is a great example. All of the “academic” writing that we are doing for this class is made available to anyone who would like to read it by posting it on our blogs. I think that this is also a benefit because I seem to be able to write. Writing, for me, has always been hard, difficult and stressful. By having a blog to post all of my class work on has created this aura of ease. The blog makes writing seem less strict and freer. When we write a post we can write more casually but it still needs to have the academic touch. Writing this way creates less stress, which I think is good because writing shouldn’t be stressful. I think that it is a benefit that “academic” writing has changed with the new media, but we just need to be careful to not take it too far.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I totally agree with you about creating a website being a valuable learning tool. In this day and age, the internet constantly surrounds us. Creating a web site will not only hone our writing skills, but also teach us new skills. We've all written research papers, and after a while, we probably won't get too much out of them. Learning new skills can be very valuable and important in keeping us up to date.
Your idea that blog writing helps to lower stress is one that I never thought of before, but I think you are definitely on to something. Once I started thinking about it, I also realized that these blogs allow those of us who may be a bit more shy than others to express our views of the reading and the topics more freely than doing so in front of everybody in discussion. I would really like to see these aspects covered a bit in class because I think they are very valuable when debating the use of modern writing approaches in English classes.
I agree with both of your comments. Sometimes I forgot that simply the act of writing can be a stress releaser. I'm not actually sure as to why that is, but I can say definitively that after writing in a public and non-stress or rules based environment, I feel a little better.
Not a bad result at all.
Post a Comment