Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Our Responsibility as Writers

Before taking this class writing was my number one hated subject which is why I didn’t take it my senior year. I dreaded, in high school, getting two page papers about anything and often would just write without really thinking or researching the subject. I assure you that my view of writing has changed severely. Writing is a way of expressing my opinion in a new and exciting way that no one has done before. I believe this is the most important responsibility a writer has to the reader; give the reader new information about a subject that he/she has already heard info about.

We have all been researching different materials for our research project and all of us should have found at least twenty different sources giving us more than enough information to develop an opinion. One question that I kept asking myself as I was reading was “how am I supposed to incorporate this into my essay without taking the same idea?” I think I spent more time thinking about how the material fit into my paper than I did actually reading the material. It was frustrating!! It is definitely easier to just read a paper, agree with the views expressed, and use them in your paper. But the responsibility that we have to the people that will read our paper is to show them a whole new way of looking at that particular subject. We should be constantly challenging our view and keeping an open mind.

My essay is on software piracy, which is a growing problem in the world for the technology world. As I was reading the articles, books, website blogs etc. there were so many aspects of piracy to be analyzed and researched. As writers, we should go into depth on a specific subject and get into the nitty-gritty of a specific aspect; just as other writers have done before. We have things like encyclopedias to show us a broad spectrum of a subject, it is up to us to use the materials professors, doctors, and teachers have given us to develop our own opinion. If we don’t develop our opinion deep enough in a subject and instead, use the opinions of others, we have failed as writers. As we are all researching and gathering bucket-loads of information, take a moment to think about how what your reading will be useful in your paper.

4 comments:

  1. Very nice. I liked how personal your paper was. It made me want to keep reading. Good job!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow, I think this was a good class, several of us have said that we feel more excited about writing now. I don't know exactly what it is about your writing that makes it so good, but everything of yours I read draws me in, even if the topic is something I'm usually not interested in. I think it might be because you seem to write naturally, it doesn't sound forced or awkward, it just flows. i don't know, but whatever it is you do, good job!

    ReplyDelete
  3. My only critique is that I would have appreciated more puntuation in your opening paragraph.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Amen brothah! :) I totally know what you mean! I could completely identify with you in the first two paragraphs. I like how you said in your third paragraph to narrow down our research to target a specific question or aspect or our topic! I need to work on that!

    ReplyDelete