The Writer You Are Becoming

In practice

Look back across the course in order. You began with the rhetorical situation: every piece of writing has a purpose, an audience, a context and a genre, and the writer's choices answer to all of them. You studied the conventions of standard written English, not as a set of arbitrary rules, but as the shared expectations that let readers in academic and professional settings trust and follow what you write, while recognizing that other varieties of English are valid in their own settings. You practiced revision, which is where most of the real work of writing happens: sharpening a thesis, building unified and coherent paragraphs, choosing evidence that supports a claim, and adjusting tone and point of view for a reader. You learned to research, to evaluate sources for currency, relevance, authority, accuracy and purpose, and to integrate them through quotation, paraphrase and summary, documented so that readers can follow your trail and so that the writers you borrow from receive credit. Finally, you learned to analyze how texts persuade, through ethos, pathos, logos and kairos, through devices, tone and structure, and through reasoning sound or flawed. Each of these skills feeds the others. Analysis makes you a sharper reviser of your own drafts; research makes your arguments more credible; command of conventions makes all of it readable. Academic writing is a conversation, and you now have the means to enter it: to listen fairly to what others have said, to respond with evidence, and to add something of your own.